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NBA FINALS: WARRIORS VS. RAPTORS

June 2, 2019

Nick Nurse

Toronto, Ontario - Postgame 2

Golden State - 109, Toronto - 104

Q. You talked earlier before the game about Kyle and his foul trouble and trying to avoid it. Tonight do you think that and any other guys' issues just caused some flow problems for your rotation?
NICK NURSE: A little bit. I just think we had a few guys in foul trouble kind of early and first half and then third quarter as well and then the fourth quarter. So I don't know, you got to play physical basketball but you got to be able to adjust and all those kind of things and try to stay out of it, and you got to avoid the silly ones too. That's all I got.

Q. Do you see Kyle sometimes maybe getting some silly ones because he's a little overaggressive?
NICK NURSE: Well, I got to look at them. I know, one, he's a great charge-taker, right, and I know one of them was possibly a charge, block/charge and those are tough, they go each way. But maybe that sixth one, I didn't really see it in the game. So in the back court, probably 80 feet or so from the basket, those are ones you got to be careful, especially when you got five. But I'll need to look at that first.

Q. The next two and a half days before you guys get back out there, how much are you going to be thinking about the first six minutes of the half and how that just was obviously very uncharacteristic for the way you guys have been playing for the last couple months?
NICK NURSE: Yeah, I'm certainly going to have to look at it, and I've always said even this series and the last series that offense is really important, taking care of the ball and scoring it because if you don't, they're coming at you really fast the other way. And again, we have got to be able to get our defense set up, and it's a lot harder when you're not taking care of it or scoring.

Just kind of playing it back through my head I thought we had -- I know we had one little turnover where Danny slipped to the rim and tried to kick it out, but I think Marc had a couple real nice little looks there. We had four or five decent possessions there and we just came away empty on all of them, and then we had probably four or five that were not good possessions either. So certainly the offense hurt the chance to get the defense set up there.

So, yeah, I'm going to have to re-watch that. I'm probably not going to enjoy that very much but I'm going to have to check it out.

Q. You guys got a little bit of life there from Fred VanVleet for a moment, I'm just wondering what you saw from him in the minutes that you got from him?
NICK NURSE: Yeah, he played a lot. What did he play tonight?

Q. 38.
NICK NURSE: Almost 40. Yeah, he was good. Obviously he's working really hard on defense, too, guarding Curry. He was running the team, he was making really quick decisions off the pick-and-roll. He had some good looks, he probably hadn't played that many straight minutes in a while. I think he had a couple there late and he was probably a little tired, but he kept taking them and stepping into them. But 17 points from him is great and running the team the way he did is great.

Q. Your team has really moved the ball effectively the last couple of days, stemming from the Milwaukee series. Tonight 17 assists on 35 made field goals. What did Golden State do differently tonight defensively?
NICK NURSE: Well, they were obviously a little more aggressive and up in us a little bit, but again I think we have got to -- I thought we were just a little bit impatient and didn't hold enough composure just to either, A, get to a strong shot or, B, move it to the next one. I thought we hit an action and something would be there and they would cover it up with some help defense. Well, when there's help, there's got to be somebody else probably open on the other side of the floor, and I thought we kind of shot a few too many into multiple defenders or two defenders around the basket, where those probably should have been maybe swung to the other side.

Again, I got to look at it a little bit, but I just felt like we were a little quick when there was something else maybe just a little bit better open.

Q. On the flip side of that, you look at their assist totals, really like 34 or 38 or something, and it seemed they were able, DeMarcus especially was able to find guys on some back cuts and there was a lot of stuff in the dunker spot that looked open. Is that just a function of just pick a poison and trying to stay, help them at three and they're going to have space to use?
NICK NURSE: Yeah, I mean, obviously you got to get up on those guys flying off the screens, Curry and Thompson. And they did a really good job of getting out of there with speed tonight, those guys getting downhill. And again a lot of those were just probably mistakes by us, weak-side mistakes or just a half step too slow. The other night we got away with a few of those where we were a half step too slow, but we would kind of somehow recover out of them.

Tonight they were really getting downhill quickly, they took it off the dribble a lot better, too. It just wasn't -- the second half especially, just wasn't nearly as physical of a game as we have seen in the playoffs. It was just hard to move and body a little bit tonight and it caught up with us a little bit in the second half.

Q. Those last five, six minutes there wasn't a lot of scoring. What were you thinking? How were you feeling down that stretch?
NICK NURSE: Well, I was feeling really good because we stopped their scoring, right, and finally got something figured out there to slow them down. And we were getting a bunch of wide-open shots, I think we missed three wide-open threes in a row there to cut it to maybe four, right, and maybe it was five. I don't know what exactly what it was, but a bunch of stops in a row and we didn't get much to show for it at the other end.

But I'm really proud of our guys for fighting and battling. The ball was not bouncing our way at all, right, I mean even on the last play Kawhi just got three incredible offensive rebounds in a row. They almost threw it right to him on that one, and it got through his hands somehow, and then they end up kicking out for that three, which we're probably going to live with that there because if he misses that, we get a rebound to tie or win the game.

Q. With the series tied going into Oakland and no longer being on home court, what are the prominent focal points that you're going to bring over to the next couple of games?
NICK NURSE: Yeah, I mean, we're in the same boat they kind of were in coming here. We got to go out there and get one, right, that's all we got to do is get one. And we can do that.

Q. You guys' half-court defense has been dominant this entire playoffs. It wasn't as dominant tonight. There were kind of some holes here and there. What did you think was the one missing element specifically in the half court?
NICK NURSE: Yeah, I mean, first of all, our half-court defense is -- first of all, it's about getting it set up. There was a lot of quick possessions by them, again, probably due to our offense, so that's the first thing.

Second thing, our half-court offense is very physical and it wasn't very physical tonight in the right way. And then again we just made some weak-side mistakes.

Q. I'm wondering if you could take me through the final possession, especially the fact that Iguodala shot it with about five seconds left on the clock, and the fact that he was so wide open during that possession.
NICK NURSE: Yeah, I think we scored the basket and I look up and there's 26.4 or something left, that's a definite foul situation, right. They could hold it all the way to the end, throw it up there, hit the rim and the horn's going to go off. I've been in that situation before. So usually under 28, if there's 28 or more you're going to play solid defense, if it's 27.9 or under you're not.

We're trying to foul. We had a couple chances there on Draymond, I think Livingston and then back to Draymond and then Curry got it. And we didn't want to foul but we put a good blitz on him. We almost made him throw it away. And I think if they're going to take a shot and give you a chance there, I'm going to probably live with the one that ended up being taken. I'm going to probably roll with that.

Probably we should have fouled before that, but like I said, he misses that we call timeout, we go down with a chance to win the ball game unbelievably, somehow.

Q. Steph said after the game to Doris Burke that he thought it was, in his words, disrespectful to leave a player like Iguodala that wide open. What did you think of that?
NICK NURSE: Well, we weren't disrespecting anybody. We were up guarding hard, and we put two on Steph and he almost threw it right to Kawhi, right? It was pretty good defense, they were scrambling around, running around like crazy. And they found Iggy, right, and they found him and like I said, if he's going to take that and give us a chance to get the ball back and win the game, we're going to probably live with that. It wasn't like we were disrespecting him and not trying to guard him. We were in a trap and rotating out of there, and again, I would like to go back and try that again about ten times, and see if one of them doesn't go our way.

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