NBA FINALS: PISTONS v SPURS

June 14, 2005

Gregg Popovich

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: I've really left them alone. They know that every playoff game is important in the sense that you can make it the biggest game of the series, and that there are no games to waste. We've created an opportunity for ourselves and it would be great to take advantage of it. We will or we won't, but no Knute Rockne talks or anything like that.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: Well, they do some things at times that one might think one sees more often in an international game: A cross-court pass in transition, for instance, you don't see that that off in American basketball, or usually we're taught to just throw it ahead and cross-court passes are dangerous and that sort of thing. Well, they will do that. They are very good at back-door situations, just reading out of whatever is available according to whatever the defense does. Some of these guys learn at an early age about the thrill of passing, and in our game, sometimes that's a lost art. Magic obviously brought it back for a while, but it gets hidden at times.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: I don't know if I said that and I guess I said that.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: Well, that explains it. (Laughter) Where's Johnny? (Laughter). I think I said that in relation to, a lot of people didn't want to go to Europe. Some teams didn't want to go to play in the preseason or have an overseas kind of trip because they thought it hurt them for the season and we think it's the opposite. We think it's a great opportunity for camaraderie, to be in a different situation, to get to know each other, so on and so forth. So I think I said I wouldn't care if our whole training camp was over there; it wouldn't bother me at all.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: Well, when his rookie season arrived e had already done some very special things in Europe. When we drafted him, we didn't know he was going to be a special player then. But when we brought him and contracted him, he was already a European champion, he had been the MVP at a lot of the European tournaments, and he was the best player in Europe. So we thought he had an opportunity to be very special because of what he had already achieved, his talents, and his competitive spirit. There was just nobody like him as far as competitiveness was concerned. Our only question was how he would adapt to his teammates, to the game, that sort of thing, and if he would learn to shoot from range. And so in the past couple of years, he's obviously answered those questions.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: Yeah, I think more like Gorbachev, he's a little bit looser, a little bit more laid back than Brezhnev. But I think it's great. It's great. The City of Los Angeles should obviously be thrilled and excited. He's a tremendous coach, so the players should be excited. He obviously wanted to do this, so he thinks it's going to work out for him and I hope he's correct. I hope it's great.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: Never even entered my head. I think it's great stuff. It's about the NBA. It's great.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: He hasn't adjusted a whole lot. I've learned to sit down and shut up, because doing it the other way would be senseless. I don't make many points, get many rebounds, pass the ball very well. So I had to figure out that what he does is pretty amazing, and he does it -- you know, he gives the effort night after night after night. So he hasn't adjusted a whole lot. He's Manu.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: Sure. One can't assume because Team A wins that they did everything correctly and that Team B did everything poorly. If you watch the film with us, you would see gross mistakes that we made in several facets of the game. What we did well was shoot from range, and that's like that alligator joke, cover all the mistakes in the water and however it goes.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: You know, Tony is a little bit different, you know, because he spent time in the States, too. He's sort of a hybrid in a sense as far as geographic terms. He's spent a lot of time overseas and obviously over here. He understood more about the NBA, how it was played, he was closer to it. His dad played ball at a high level, and they are different people in that sense.

COACH GREGG POPOVICH: It depends specifically on the player and what his powers of concentration are, what his abilities are in the area of focus. I think there's a natural tendency to allow complacency to exist when you win a game or when you win two in a row. When we won three in a row against Phoenix, our fourth game was just abysmal. We walked down the floor. We were very poor in many, many respects and it finally got us. We talked about it and talked about it and it didn't matter. People are human beings. So sometimes it just is a matter of something has got to hit you first. Tonight, if we're down by 15 at half, obviously it will hit us if we didn't come out focused. So we just always depend on the fact that these guys are pretty mature. They understand what's at stake. It's not the 17th game of the season, and what possible reason could there be to not be focused. You play poorly, you play poorly, if the shots don't go down, I don't care, but there are a lot of other things that you can do that have nothing to do with percentages.