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NBA FINALS: LAKERS v CELTICS

June 17, 2008

Phil Jackson

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS: Game Six

COACH PHIL JACKSON: Well, there's not much to say, actually, at the end of this except to recap kind of the season which we felt like was a remarkable one for us, remarkable for the Celtics. Congratulations to them, their staff, their players. They showed their strength tonight in winning a decisive game.

Q. How surprised were you by that final score?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: I don't know what the final score is. Let me look at it here for you (laughter).
Yes (laughter), surprising.

Q. Can I ask for a degree of surprise, just the whole thing and how it unfolded and everything?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Well, the last two minutes of the second period buried the team emotionally, and we went into the locker room at halftime and tried to get our guys back on bearing and really came out in the third quarter and really couldn't turn the momentum around.

Q. It looked like your guys just couldn't solve the Celtic defense almost from the beginning of the series to the end.
COACH PHIL JACKSON: There were times when I thought their defense was exceptional, and there were times where I thought we didn't play very smart basketball in execution. But I think more than anything, Kobe started off that game with a hot hand and then I think his legs, you could see his shot was flat, he didn't get his shot going, and it really changed the course of the game. He started out so strong and then I think he only made three field goals the rest of the game, so that really was a change.
I think one of the things they did is they really focused on him and made sure that he wasn't going to be the guy that hurt them, and we didn't have guys step up in this instance tonight.

Q. I imagine the team is very disappointed. What did you tell them after the game was over?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: What word did you use?

Q. Very disappointed, extremely disappointed.
COACH PHIL JACKSON: We're disappointed, our fans are disappointed. I think everybody is disappointed that we didn't get a game out of this, give ourselves a chance. You know, tonight Rondo was the star. He was the guy out there that made the plays, got the steals, pushed their offense into high drive and created havoc for us.

Q. What do you take out of this, and what do you feel like you need to get better at for next year?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Well, it's incremental, obviously, at this particular time. But you know, when you look at a halftime score like we had with no offensive rebounds and shooting 29 percent, you know, we're really disappointed in that fact. We carried some rebounds in Games 4 and 5, and to shoot as poorly as we did and not come up with second opportunities and second chances, I thought we played on our heels from the very get-go. They overran us, Garnett knocked Pau down in the lane and scored an easy basket in the first four or five possessions and set kind of a tone that they were going to establish an aggressive form, and we never met that energy all night tonight. So we have to get some players if we're going to come back and repeat, to have that kind of aggressiveness that we need.

Q. When you look back at a year ago what you guys were going through and now, do you feel like going into this off-season with Kobe maybe having a new appreciation for what he has around him, obviously you've got something to look forward to, going forward with Andrew coming back, et cetera?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Without a doubt. We suffered injuries and survived a season and rebuilt our team and came back and had a great playoff run until the Celtics were able to extinguish that hope.
But we'll look back on this favorably. We were surprised we were here, and we're glad that we had an opportunity. But whenever you get this opportunity, you don't want to let it slip away, and we did.

Q. Did you guys feel like this was the team that you had been coaching all along, or did this seem like kind of a different team in The Finals?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: They took us out of what we like to do, and I think a lot of that was off the dribble, and they were able to establish and squelch pretty much our dribble penetration. Some of those things we had to change, and we had trouble doing it tonight. Rondo picked us apart because of it. He got the ball off the dribble and steals, and that was kind of indicative of how it went.

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