	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 FINALS: WARRIORS VS. RAPTORS

June 1, 2019

Nick Nurse

Toronto, Ontario - Practice Day

Q. At this point in the playoffs do you feel like from an opponent approach standpoint, you guys and Kawhi have sort of seen every sort of approach? And to follow on that, were you surprised how much trapping Golden State applied on Thursday night?
NICK NURSE: No would be the answer to both those questions. They were in a coverage the other night I had never seen before, which was a switch to a late blitz. It was pretty interesting. I had never seen it before and it was innovative. They do a lot of innovative stuff. So I would say that they probably got other things we haven't seen that we're going to have to adjust to on the fly. I'm probably never surprised that he gets blitzed as much as he does.

Q. Were you happy with how Kawhi and your whole team sort of responded to what they were doing?
NICK NURSE: Yeah, for the most part. I think we made pretty good decisions. There are always some things you probably would have -- other outlets you would have went to on some of those offensive deals. There's other spacing you would have done, other cuts you might have made.

But I thought for the most part we were trying to get to an open area, trying to get the ball to the open man. We mixed it up between cuts and rim attempts versus kick-outs for threes. That's all you're trying to do. I keep saying, our offense is hit the open man, and that's what we were trying to do.

Q. The eight or nine minutes that DeMarcus played the other night, how did he look to you? And would you anticipate that you guys have to deal with a little bit more of him tomorrow?
NICK NURSE: You're always concerned with him. I think he's certainly a low-post force. It's hard to guard him with one guy when they decide to throw it in there to him and he gets going. And then when he's playing on the perimeter, he can do both things: He's a very good passer and he can also knock down a shot if you don't go up and guard him.

So he's a big body, good player, lots of skills. I would imagine he's going to get better and better as the series goes and get some timing and feel back out on the court.

Q. Yesterday you talked about Marc's ability to guard smaller guys and switch out and handle that well. What is it about his demeanor, though, that seems to fit with this team? He's never really openly down or up. Is that a great fit for you guys?
NICK NURSE: Yeah, I think we have some veteran guys that have seen a lot and played in a lot of games. I always talk about him: He's not only played in a lot of big NBA games, but he's played on the international stage at the highest level. I think he has a couple silver medals under his belt or something like that.

I think he got into maybe one of the lowest points of his career in these playoffs. He had a 1-for-9 game; people were basically writing him off. We had to get him out of the lineup and not start him -- all those kind of things. I did talk to him about it and he just didn't waver at all. It was like, "Tomorrow, it's going to be great," was his answer. Again I told him, I said, "Listen, you're a great player." I tell him that. I told him that several times. "You're a great player because you've lifted the level of who our team thinks they can be and you lift the level of other players' play." That's, to me, what great players do.

But he's also like any other guy, too. Some nights are really good and some nights they're really not and then they have to pick themselves up and bounce back. He's got a strong ability to do that.

Q. Two Kawhi questions, the first: What happened on that late switch to blitz that you were telling us about earlier? How did it turn out for you?
NICK NURSE: Well, there were several of them. You just have to not get lulled into getting back into the open space. It's like you think it's a switch and not a blitz and you start playing your switch offense, and then all of a sudden it turns into a blitz offense. So you have to leave your switch offense and go to your blitz offense.

We did mediocre with it. Hopefully we can do better with it.

Q. You won Game 1 against the Warriors, obviously, on a night where your best player didn't have his best game, which they have never seen before in The Finals. Can Kawhi get to that next level still given the leg trouble that he's having?
NICK NURSE: Yeah, I don't think the leg trouble is much of an issue. And I'm expecting him to play a lot better tomorrow.

Q. A lot of playoff teams that go against the Warriors try to target Curry defensively in pick-and-roll and try to wear him out that way, but it seems like your team does it differently. Why do you go about that differently?
NICK NURSE: We use a term "keep playing" on offense. That means that we don't like to react a lot of times to switches. When there's a switch made, as I mentioned, we have a switch offense that we play. But a lot of it is to just keep playing, and not let a switch stop your offense and try to overanalyze a mismatch or bog down and wait 10 seconds to try to post feed against a smaller guy or whatever, because all it does is send you into a low-shot clock situation, which are low-percentage situations. We like to just keep playing.

And it's easier to do now because everybody switches. They're switching every night of the year now. Five years ago, it wasn't like that. Now you're seeing it so much, your guys get a whole hundred games a year to get used to that.

Q. Doc Rivers called Steph Curry underrated. Something like the most underrated player in the league. Two things: Does that make sense to you? And what's the biggest challenge in guarding Steph?
NICK NURSE: I call him a transformational player. He's got kids all over the world shooting from 40 feet away. I think even as you've seen the three-point shot become so rapidly used in the last three or four years, a lot of that is because of Golden State and Steph and Klay and some of the other guys, KD, the other guys they have.

Now you're seeing quickly the league start to shoot six and eight feet behind the line pretty regularly. You didn't see that maybe even a couple years ago. So I think he has transformed the way people view the three-pointer, the distance of the three-pointer as well.

What makes him hard to guard? He's got an incredible shooting stroke from anywhere. He's got an incredible handle so when people are chasing him, he just dribbles and dribbles and gets around them and uses all that skill that he has. He's got a great, skillful finishing game with the floaters, with the taking it right to the rim if you're constantly pressed up on him. And then he's unbelievable at giving it up and racing back outside the line and catching and firing a three.

He's a handful, let's say that. He can do it all.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you, coach.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297