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NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: MAGIC v CAVALIERS

May 22, 2009

Mike Brown

CLEVELAND, OHIO: Game Two

Cavaliers Â– 96
Magic - 95

COACH BROWN: What a heck of a game. I thought tonight, first of all, you got to give Orlando credit. They are a very resilient team and they kept fighting and clawing and fighting and clawing to come back and take the lead, actually.
And there are some things that we can do better as a staff to help put our players in a better position, especially when they went on their run and we'll watch the tape and figure that out tonight. You got to give them credit for playing the way they played and staying with it no matter what the score was. Because with the way our crowd is and being down what they were down, they could have already easily said, hey, we already got one, we'll wait until we get home and pack this in, but they didn't.
We had a lot of great performances, individual performances from our guys and just a good overall performance from our team. Got to give Sasha credit for staying ready and for giving us some good minutes off the bench. The minutes he gave us off the bench were very productive.
I also thought that throughout the night Z was very good. And Z was very good -- this is going to sound kind of funny but for a guy that's 7-foot 3 inches, he was very good getting 50/50 balls. Every time I think back to the game, he was diving on the ground for a loose ball. It took him a long time to get down there on the dive, but, I mean, he was on the ground getting after them. And he probably came up with two or three of them, which were huge possessions for us throughout the game. And obviously we need him to rebound, which is what he did tonight.
LeBron James, that's how we drew the play up. Golly, whew. He's an amazing person first, and obviously he is an amazing player. And just to have the wherewithal to have that type of confidence in yourself to know that there's one second on the clock and you're ending this thing right now and if it doesn't end right now I have big enough shoulders to take care of whatever the outcome is. But to be able to take that on and have that type of confidence and take that shot, not many people could do it.
Amazing shot by an amazing player. That's what great players do. And that was a side note, that's not what we drew up.

Q. Stan said he felt you guys were going for the lob like you did at Indiana. Hedo took that away, and LeBron came back and hit the shot. Was he accurate in the way he was defending the play?
COACH BROWN: You know, Stan was in our huddle. That's exactly right. We were going for the lob. Hedo took it away. So LeBron said I'm going to win it, and he popped out for the 3.
That's where he created the separation. Because when Hedo took the lob away, Hedo -- I mean, LeBron is a big, strong guy. That momentum that he had to use to try to take that back door away and LeBron's quickness to create the separation going back up the floor gave him enough space to get a nice look at the 3. So, I mean, again, we didn't tell him to do that. He did that on his own.
It is the same thing kind of with Rashard the other night. The other night he was up on Rashard, he jab-faked, rolled up and shoots a contested 3 and knocks it in. Hell of a shot by LeBron.

Q. What do you think has been the difference between the first half and the second half? Because it's happened twice now.
COACH BROWN: You know what? In the second half they came out and made some adjustments in the second half. You got to give Stan credit. You got to give their team credit because they are very resilient. We have to do a better job of helping our team.
As the head coach I did not do a good job helping my team and putting them in the best position when they ran -- when they started going to the pick-and-roll game with Courtney Lee and Rashard. It was a double-digit lead when they started doing that. They hit some shots. Next thing you know they're very confident.
And I have to do a better job of making sure for 48 minutes -- just like I keep telling our players -- that no matter what scenario we're coming across on the floor I make the right adjustments and I put them in the best position to defend whatever action they see.

Q. When somebody hits a shot like LeBron's, there is a euphoria that courses through the team and the city, everything. But at some point tonight or on the flight to Orlando, is there going to be some post-partum depression where the team -- they recognize or they look up and they say, you know what, we were a game-winning shot away from going down 2-0 on our way to Orlando? How long does the euphoria last?
COACH BROWN: I mean, you can use the flip side on it. They were one shot away from going down 0-1 with us winning that first game and Rashard hitting it.
So if I'm answering your question right, so with LeBron hitting that shot, I guess where I'm going, there are a lot of hypotheticals, if, woulda, coulda, shoulda. We won the game. It was a hard-fought game. We felt like we could play better, especially in the second half. We feel like we can make the right adjustments and get a win down there in the next game in Orlando.
But we could have easily said -- we could easily sit back and say that first game we should have won. That shot by Rashard over Z -- over Andy, I mean, that was a lucky shot, so on and so forth. He made it, we lost, we had to make adjustments, get ready for this game.
We made our adjustments, and we did just enough to put our great player in position to where he can go win the game. So we are going to take it. The series is 1-1 now. Now we are getting ready for Game 3.

Q. So there is no overwhelming feeling?
COACH BROWN: No. I mean, there's none. We knew this was going to be hard. That's a very good basketball team in the other locker room, and you are going to have to have some breaks. You can't go through the playoffs without having some lucky bounces here and there. They got one, quote-unquote, lucky bounce in Game 1, if you want to say that with Rashard's shot. We got one in Game 2. Let's get ready for Game 3 now.

Q. Can you elaborate on the Sasha experiment, obviously not only on defense but some extra offense tonight, too.
COACH BROWN: Sasha started for us when we went to the finals in -- I think it was two years ago. He was our starting two guard. He has played some big games, played some big minutes, and he has done some nice things on both ends of the floor. And we wanted to try to give them a different look by going with a little bit more length and athleticism in Sasha.
Going into the game today late in the afternoon is when I made the decision to go with him. We kept jumping back and forth. I kept jumping back and forth. As a matter of fact, finally on my drive in I just wanted to make sure that I was thinking right because there is one person in this organization that drives me absolutely crazy, because even if he feels that I'm right in certain situations he's going to say the opposite and try to fight just to get me to think. So I called that one person and I said I'm going with it. I'm playing Sasha and this is how it's going to be. I was a little shocked because he didn't fight me. He said great. I was like, okay.
That was when the final decision was made, when I was driving in.

Q. Who was it?
COACH BROWN: The one person? I'm not telling.

Q. I want to know if, in fact, you believe that this is the first team that you guys have actually been challenged throughout the playoffs?
COACH BROWN: You know, we had some easy -- not easy games. We had -- the outcome made it look easy because we won by double digits in the first eight games of the playoffs.
And all these teams are here for a reason. We knew Orlando was a great team. They gave us problems during the regular season. We just felt we weren't going to go undefeated throughout our play-off run. When we were faced with a team, we are faced with a loss, we just wanted to see -- as a staff, first we wanted to see how we would respond as a group.
We lost the first game. It was tough. We're probably going to lose again throughout the course of the playoffs. But we have to understand, I think our guys do, that it's not one win or one loss or two wins or two losses or three wins or three losses that tell the outcome of the series. Somebody has to win four times, and we know Orlando is a tough team. I don't know what it's going to be at the end of the day.
But it's definitely a challenge for us, and it's a little bit harder than our first eight games.

Q. I was wondering if you would speak to the strategy on Dwight Howard and the execution there of holding him down to eight shots, from 30 points to 10 points the second game. Just the kinds of things you were thinking and what you were trying to do and what the guys did do.
COACH BROWN: In our hip pocket we were thinking about doubling Dwight. Again, we were going back and forth whether or not we were going to double-team him. Really we made the decision right before tip-off. We didn't even tell our guys in our pregame speech that we were going to do that. Right before tip-off, we said, hey, this is what we are going to do.
So most of the night we stayed with the double team. Sometimes we called it off to see if we can keep them guessing. And, you know, we were just going to live with him trying to find guys on the perimeter and us trying to close out and contest late to their shooters.
But we gave our big guys some help tonight and we didn't give them much help in the last game.

Q. Can you talk about the offense in the second half. There seemed to be a little bit of standing around. But also they seemed to take the ball out of LeBron's hands a lot, especially in the fourth quarter. His teammates didn't -- you know, missed a lot of shots in the second half. Anything you want to do looking forward? What can you say about the offense?
COACH BROWN: I thought we -- there were a couple of big calls made that usually when you have a great player and he's aggressive that don't go -- that usually go his way.
It would be interesting for me to go back and look at the tape and see if that was a charge or see it LeBron tried to sidestep Anthony Johnson. It will be interesting for me to go back and look at the tape and see if when Bron drove the basketball if Dwight stepped up and hit him before the travel, if there was contact.
And with Bron being a big, strong guy, for some reason he doesn't get those bumps that everybody else gets because they think that he's supposed to play through it and it don't affect his drive. But he is human and it does affect his drive.
So I thought there were a couple possessions late that we made the right play. Throughout the flow of the third and fourth quarter, I thought we did some good things. I thought we had some decent looks. The ball wasn't as stagnant tonight as it was in the first game, so we did improve.
And I think I have confidence in our guys. I trust our guys, and I have to keep putting them in situations where we'll get some movement, where the ball won't stick or it won't always go to Bron. And if I do, our guys will step up and make shots. But we did just enough to keep scoring and get the win.

Q. In terms of just a jaw-dropping moment, where does tonight rank with LeBron's other great performances in your mind?
COACH BROWN: Off the top of my head, since I've been -- well, I guess this is the only time it has been in the playoffs. That's probably the biggest shot I have seen him make since I have been with him in the playoffs.
I tell you what. That game up in Detroit, I never seen nothing like that, especially in person, when he had 25 points or something like that in the fourth quarter, because they knew we were going to him on every play and they double-teamed him, they triple-teamed him. He didn't pass, and every shot he took he made. And I still -- when I think back on that game, that game still amazes me.

End of FastScripts

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