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NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: CAVALIERS v PISTONS

June 2, 2007

Mike Brown

CLEVELAND, OHIO: Practice Day

COACH BROWN: You know, first of all, I would like to acknowledge the Detroit Pistons. That's a big-time organization. It's a big-time team, starting with Joe Dumars. They have done a terrific job year after year after year just putting not just a good team on the floor but an excellent team on the floor, and this was a hard-fought series where every single game could have gone either way. Every game came down to one or two plays, and sometimes we were on the winning end, sometimes they were on the winning end, but I definitely want to congratulate those guys for a tough series. Either team, again, could have won this and it's nothing to drop your head about.
I thought the thing that got us over the hump was our defense, especially in the fourth quarter. I thought we turned it up a notch defensively, they were shooting almost 50% from the floor in the first half, and we weren't defending the way that we were capable of. I thought in the second half our guys went out and made a conscious effort of trying to get stops. And once we were able to get stops, it didn't allow them to always set up in their half-court trap, and when they did or if we got it off a rebound, we were able to become the aggressors, because we were getting stops and we were gaining confidence from getting stops. So our second half defense was terrific.
I thought everybody contributed. Again, all the way down to, you know, David Wesley and Dwayne Jones and Shannon Brown in suits. They were into the game, David was helping me coach, he was telling the players what needed to be done, he was reminding everybody of stuff, Dwayne was cheering, Shannon was cheering, I was cheering, Scot had his fifteen seconds. Eric Snow was terrific. I went to him and I said Eric, "I'm going to play Damon, see if we can spread the floor, drive and kick and see if we can get some looks that way," and you talk about a professional, he handled it just like a professional. Every time I called his number, whether it was for 2.2 seconds, like at the end of the first half, or for seven or eight minutes at the end of the fourth quarter, whatever it was, he was always into the game, and he always came up big.
Everybody on the bench from Anderson, to Donyell to Damon. Damon played big minutes for us, he was steady for us when he came into the game and his defense in that fourth quarter was great. He stuck his nose in. He tried to box out and he tried to rebound.
Our starting five, they've been terrific the entire year. I can't say enough about Larry Hughes. Larry Hughes is a guy that's playing in a lot of pain but he's sucking it up and getting out there and he's getting it done for the betterment of this team.
Daniel Gibson. Wow. Tonight I was wowing Daniel like I was on LeBron. I didn't have a stat sheet, someone told me Daniel had 31, they said he had 19 in the fourth and I said, "are you kidding me?" And they said "No, 31, and 19 in the fourth." That was LeBronesque, if that makes sense. He played a great basketball game defensively and trying to rebound.
The last player I want to talk about is LeBron. For 22 years old and knowing he's our guy, and the double-teams and triple-teams that he sees night after night, and the 45-plus minutes he plays for us night after night after night, he's one hell of a player. We understand that we still have a ways to go. It's one day, one game at a time for us.
One more thing before I forget, this crowd was terrific. We're going to need you for this last series, too. You guys were great.

Q. Mike, it seemed like you guys were hanging in the game with smoke and mirrors, because your offense wasn't running right, you weren't making a lot of shots, was it just to get somebody to make shots and get them to loosen up?
COACH BROWN: We knew they were going to hit LeBron and we wanted to invite the hit and spread the floor. You've got Daniel Gibson, Damon Jones and Donyell Marshall with LeBron James on the floor and you play pick-and-roll with Andy. We wanted to invite the hit, and just like in New Jersey, we have to step in and make shots, and if they close out hot to us, we've got to drive it. If we're playing a team that's going to junk the game up, you've just got to play basketball at times and your spacing has to be correct, you have to cut hard, you have to screen hard, you've got to move the ball and drive at the defense to try to collapse it. So as long as we kept the floor spread and we were aggressive, and we moved that basketball, we knew sooner or later somebody was going to get some good looks or we were going to be able to drive the ball versus a hard close-out.

Q. Mike, you mentioned that these games could have gone either way. You lose the first two, tough ones, come back and win four straight. Can you explain how the younger, inexperienced team remained more poised than the playoff-tested team?
COACH BROWN: I don't know if we played -- one thing I preached to my guys is one day, one game at a time, and if we truly do that, if we truly focus on one day, one game at a time, then it doesn't matter how much games you've got to play, doesn't matter how many wins you've got to get in a row because you're not thinking beyond the next game, and I think our guys believed that and they tried to follow that and that's why it didn't seem insurmountable when we went down 0-2, we just concentrated on the third game and then on the fourth game and so on and so forth. I think that simplifies the process a lot.

Q. Can you talk about LeBron's starting at the beginning of the season to break huddles about that one, two, three championship, and what that said about his mentality at the start of year.
COACH BROWN: I'm not a guy who likes to look too far into the future and I wanted to say one, two, three defense, But the very first practice we had, he goes, "one, two, three championship." I was like, "Damn, how am I going to tell them to say one, two, three defense." So I let it go on for a little bit and finally I said, he's the man, we'll say it, we want that type of pressure, let's live up to it. He's the man and this is no easy task.
The next team, it's a great team, Not a good team, not an excellent team, not a very good team, that's a great team and we're going to have to pry every ounce of energy for 48 minutes every single game to have a chance.

Q. Coach, can you just talk about having to go against Pop and then also the way that the Spurs play and the fact that you guys beat them twice during the regular season, if that's going to help you guys confidence-wise heading in here.
COACH BROWN: Last year Washington beat us 3-1 during the regular season, Detroit beat us 3-1; regular season means nothing during the playoffs, it's a new environment, new game, new day. And it's not me against Pop, it's the Spurs against the Cavaliers. It's going to be a tough-fought ballgame, because they have a superstar in Tim Duncan, they have two great players in Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, and they have a great surrounding cast. They defend, they know how to score and they don't make mistakes, so it's going to be a tough contest for us against that team. But, again, if we play hard for 48 minutes and we try to limit our mistakes, we're going to give ourselves a chance.

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