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NBA RISING STARS 2017February 17, 2017Mike BrownNew Orleans, Louisiana World Team - 150 U.S. Team - 141 Q. Coach, I'm curious about a coach's point of view in a game like this where the result is not that important. When do you start pushing your guys to get the win? When do you let them kind of have fun on the field? MIKE BROWN: This is a great group, the World Team. We started having fun once we got together, cracking jokes, laughing, the whole nine yards. I just told them the whole time, I said, hey, you know how these games go. Teams don't play hard generally. I said, I'm not asking you guys to play hard. I'm just saying play a little smarter and a little harder than the other team and see if we can get a lead going into halftime. Then we'll get a pulse of how they are coming out and see if we can win it going down the stretch. That's all it was. Our guys had fun, I thought, the whole game, but they played just hard enough to get a win. Q. When you have a player like Jamal Murray who was on fire, how do you manage to keep them on fire and have the other guys play for him? MIKE BROWN: You know what, I was going to call every play for him coming down the floor even though we didn't have any plays. But it was easy because his teammates were yelling -- every time the other team scored it or we got a rebound, his teammates were yelling, don't pass, Jamal. Don't pass. So he took that to heart, and he made some big shots for us, especially going down the stretch. Q. Coach, can you take us through the days leading up to this event. Is there even any preparation in the coaching staff, or do you just let the guys in and let them do their own thing? MIKE BROWN: First of all, one of our assistants with the Warriors, Bruce Fraser, known as Q-Dog. Q has coached in this game before. I've done everything in the All-Star, been a head coach, been an assistant coach, but I've never coached the rookie All-Star game. When Steve came to me and asked me to do it, I was excited because I'd never been around the young guys. So Q came to me. You've got to ask Q, because I'm not going to tell you the reason he told me to ask for the World Team. But we clinched pretty early. Q was like, Mike, ask for the World Team. I was like, okay, why? He told me his reasoning, and I was like, okay, I'm going to do it. So the biggest assist in terms of preparation goes to Q-Dog, Bruce Fraser. He knew what he was talking about. He's a prophet. I had faith in him. We went with it and got the "W." Other than that, we just kind of had fun. Q. Hey, Coach, you've always been known as a players coach, always had respect of the players. What did you bring to loosen up that locker room over there on the World Team? Because I know there's some pressure in terms of USA versus World. So what did you do to loosen those guys up? MIKE BROWN: We had a couple of pregame videos. Q. Did you do a dance-off? Did you JuJu on Dat Beat? MIKE BROWN: I thought about it. Our guys, I made it -- you know, it's funny. Today at practice I kind of threw this out here. I separated the first year guys and second year guys. These guys are just great kids. So I told the first year guys, I said, hey, you know that being a first-year guy at this game, you've got to perform in front of the group. And they thought I was -- they were waiting for me to start laughing and said, ha, no, no, no. I said, no, I'm dead serious. All these second-year guys, they had to do it last year. So the second-year guys caught on and said, yeah, yeah, step up. So each guy stepped up and did a little skit before we practiced today. It was the funniest thing in the world. It was great. Q. Who had the funniest? Come on, give me your funniest. MIKE BROWN: Sabonis is funny. He didn't know what to do, so he sung happy birthday in Lithuanian to nobody because it wasn't anybody's birthday. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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