NBA FINALS: PISTONS v SPURS

June 10, 2005

Manu Ginobili

MANU GINOBILI: Well, it's not exactly "do whatever you want," but he started to allow me to do more things. You think that usually, as I heard, he didn't let other players do before, so I'm very glad. I knew that I could help the team more if I followed my instincts a little bit more, so it's not that we made an agreement, but I tried to calm down and slow the pace down a little bit and he slowed down a little bit too, and allowed me to do more things. That's the thing. But besides that, I think basically, we just are looking for the same thing. We are both big competitors. We all love what we do and we all want to win.

MANU GINOBILI: Yeah, I think it started last season. It just happened that this year, I played better, and with more confidence and started doing things better, so it shows more now, but I think that last year, it was already there.

MANU GINOBILI: I think there's got to be something else. Guys like R.C. and Sam Presti, they are smart, they travel the world a lot and you're going to see not only many of the guys traveling, getting another look, watching tapes and stuff like that. Probably they were a little fortunate because even though if you are good, sometimes it's not easy to find a good player at the 28th, or 57th in my case. So I think you've got to give them credit because it's not normal that many teams have a lottery pick, they can't get a good one and these guys with late choices, they have been able to build a great team.

MANU GINOBILI: Well, sometimes you don't think you're going to make some shots, but you just keep trying. You feel so excited at that moment, so confident in some parts of the game that you start believing that you can do more things that you really can or thought you can. But, you know, it's kind of hard to surprise yourself because you know yourself better than everybody and you're already very confident, especially at this point when there's so much adrenaline and so many things on the game that when you are able to get it going, you know, you feel very, very well.

MANU GINOBILI: I think it's starting to look like that. There are many teams that have more than two or three foreigners. I think that this franchise was one of the first to start relying so much on foreigners. But you can see it every day in every championship that all of the other countries are starting to get better, there's a lot of talent everywhere, desire. Basketball is growing so you're going to start seeing it more often.

MANU GINOBILI: Yeah, you end up learning a lot of languages at the beginning of the season. Tony speaks with (Romain) Sato in French; Beno was speaking Russian, and Pop gives some words, too. Last year, Hedo (Turkoglu) was speaking Turkish, and so you have a lot of languages in there.

MANU GINOBILI: That makes me look like a genius, and I am not. I just feel more -- way more responsible this year in what the team does, and I know that with Tony, we are the ones that have got to create off the dribble. So in many games it's going to be Tony, others it's going to be me, and we know, we have that possibility and Pop trusts us to do that. So in moments where the team needs a basket or needs to get something, either Tony and me are going to try to drive, get an easy basket, find an open guy and draw a foul. There are ways to go to a line and get a point there. You being a part of a team, you know when the team is in trouble and so you're going to try to do something to change the pace of the game.

MANU GINOBILI: No. I had no idea. I remember that a month or a couple of weeks before the draft, I went online to see one of those Web sites where they guess who is going to be picked. I was in none of them I think. So I said, okay, I will be with the national team playing in Brazil, so I just, you know, forget about the draft. I remember one morning I was -- the team manager woke me up and telling me I was drafted. I thought it was a mistake or something because I didn't hear anything. Nobody ever contact me. They just picked me.

MANU GINOBILI: First of all, you get worried, because there's a vein here that just gets so big, you think it's going to explode. (Laughter). No, he's a smart coach. He knows how to get the best from his team. You know, he got that temperament that he gets very upset, and he's not afraid to tell anything to anybody. He doesn't care if it's Tim Duncan or the player that is on the IR. So everybody appreciates that, because, there are, you know, many coaches that never tells the star what to do or the way he does it. So everybody feels the same situation, you know, I think it's really good for the spirit of the team.