	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: CELTICS VS CAVALIERS

May 19, 2017

Brad Stevens

Boston, Massachusetts: Postgame

Cavaliers - 130, Celtics - 86.

Q. Was Isaiah's injury something he played through the last few games? Did he aggravate it more tonight?
BRAD STEVENS: He's had a nagging hip injury. He aggravated it pretty significantly on Friday in Washington Game 6, went through a bunch of different testing on Saturday and Sunday, was able to play Monday, hasn't felt great either of the two days. But today I thought he looked much different in the first half. When we went back to the locker room, our training staff and doctors got with him. He was pretty despondent not to be able to play. I mean, that guy is a tough guy, and he plays through a lot. For him to have to sit is really hard.

Q. Do you expect him to play the next game?
BRAD STEVENS: I think he's going to be reevaluated tomorrow, and we'll see is what I was told. I don't know anything further to that. I don't know if [Jeff Twiss] or somebody out of our PR group will communicate that tomorrow or early Sunday, whatever the determination is.

Q. What kind of an impact did that have on your team, not having your best player at 100 percent?
BRAD STEVENS: Not 44 points' worth. But I don't want to put that on any one guy. I think ultimately they were terrific, we were poor. You've got to be able to pick up the slack certainly when other guys aren't available. But they were tremendous tonight. I thought we hit a couple of shots early to kind of stem the tide of the initial run. Then they went on one, and I felt like two games in a row now I've felt like when we've missed multiple opportunities in a row offensively, we've really let that dictate how we played on the other end of the court. That's disappointing. But they've taken advantage of us both nights.

Q. It's almost --
BRAD STEVENS: It's hard to ask a question, right?

Q. It really is. Do you have any -- as this is happening, what are your thoughts while this is going on? Guys are missing shots, they're --
BRAD STEVENS: Well, when it's 40 at the end of the third quarter, you just hope that nobody fouls so you can get through the media timeouts because you just need to make sure that you get out as healthy as you can. This game counts as one loss, thankfully. Thankfully they don't do point differential when they're trying to figure out a series.

I think ultimately we have to home in on the things that we can do to perform better. I thought we did that. I thought we were going to play better than that, and we didn't. And it was disappointing. It was disappointing for all of us. But as I told the guys, that's a loss, and we have to move our focus toward Sunday. We're going to have to play a lot better.

Q. Mentally how damaging was that? It seemed like Cleveland took your heart, took your will, took your spirit, and kind of enjoyed doing it.
BRAD STEVENS: No, I don't think there's any question. Like I said, I thought us having those empty offensive possessions where maybe you miss an open shot and they go down and convert or you have an opportunity and you turn it over and they go down and convert, those things were bigger than just the three points they were scoring. I felt like they had a negative impact on kind of our look, and again, credit them.

One of the things that I really leave with tonight was at the start of the fourth quarter, they had a bunch of guys that have been in the league for a long time that were playing their butts off. Kyle Korver, Channing Frye, Richard Jefferson -- those guys were playing the right way up 45 freaking points. Tremendous examples for us to learn from. You play the right way all the time.

We didn't do enough good things to even keep it close. I literally just walked out of my office, and Geno Auriemma was in there. He wasn't very good at understanding what I was going through. But nonetheless, I picked his brain for as long as I could before I came down here.

Q. You guys are 41 points behind after the first half, so what did you tell your team at halftime?
BRAD STEVENS: No coach wants to be in that situation, obviously. We said we're going to go out, we're going to try to play the next play the right way, and go from there. I don't know what else you say in that moment. The guys are really down. There's one thing to be down 18 or 20, but when you're down 41, that's quite a hill to climb. So it was trying to just focus on the next possession, the next task at hand.

Q. Have you been able to run your stuff, offensive execution? Have they been physically taking you out of running your --
BRAD STEVENS: Yeah, I thought Wednesday we were pretty darned good in getting shots that we wanted to get. Not as much today. I thought we were slow to react to some plays. Then we have to do a great job converting. We have to take our opportunities that are given and make them pay when we do have an angle at the rim or we do have an open shot or whatever the case may be. But there's no question we weren't as crisp tonight. There's no doubt about that.

Q. Where do you guys go from here?
BRAD STEVENS: Cleveland, tomorrow.

Q. How do you kind of get guys to try to regroup and not be deflated?
BRAD STEVENS: I mean, you know what, you go and you compete on Sunday. I mean, what else do you do? And that's what I said when I went in the locker room after the game: Each game is worth one. We played probably better than the score indicated in the last one, but not good, and we obviously played one of our worst games you could play today. Coupled with how good they are and how well they've played, that's going to be a bad deal. We have to play a lot better. So we're going to focus on us, we're going to figure out ways to play better, and we're going to go after it on Sunday. We're getting on that plane to play well.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297