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NBA FINALS: MAGIC v LAKERS

June 14, 2009

Phil Jackson

ORLANDO, FLORIDA: Game Five

Q. You talked about wanting them to channel their emotion and use it. What have you sensed the last couple days? You said also they might be overexcited but what have you sensed?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: They're prepared, I think both emotionally and mentally for this game. Physically if they can stand the pace they'll be fine.

Q. How much have you been able to talk to Tex throughout the playoffs? How hard has it been on you not having him here with you by your side?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Well, we didn't anticipate that Tex would travel with the team in this playoffs, even before he had the stroke last month. Not being able to carry conversation with him on the phone, so I just get reports that he's enjoying the game, he's watching it, very close to what's going on.

Q. Over the years you guys have been real close. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with him? He's been by your side pretty much the whole way, right?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Yeah, uh-huh. When I became the head coach of the Bulls, I asked Johnny Bach to be the defensive coordinator, and Tex Winter to be the offensive coordinator, so I had coaches at two different positions there.
Both of them had great experience in the league, and Tex obviously an innovator of the sideline triangle, which his coach at USC was a proponent of and a very popular west coast offense. But Tex refined it, and his dedication to it kind of made him the drill sergeant for the teams.

Q. Was he always the guy who could kind of tell you when you were wrong or when you needed to hear something?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Well, he always encouraged team play and system play, and so if it would become too individual, he would bring the fact the ball wasn't moving or the team isn't playing together or there's a stagnation out there on the floor. He'd always bring that to bear. But more than anything else, he kept a running score on the sidelines, which is now done by Brian Shaw, whose cryptic handwriting is poor quality, but we can still get our way through it.
But usually at time-outs, then we have something to check for the last four or five possessions. Tex would say, hey, we haven't run pinch post offense or haven't got the ball inside, two-pass sequence. So he had something to contribute. Now basically Brian has taken that position over.

Q. When you look at the makeup of these two teams, their relative youth, can you just talk a little bit about the future of these organizations? And do you think it's possible they could meet again in a Finals down the road?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Certainly Orlando is very capable of coming back to The Finals with the youth that they have. Obviously free agency in both clubs has a bearing upon what teams will do and how they'll have to maintain their roster and cap management. But both teams I think played extremely well during the year. Orlando's youth is quite apparent, both their front court and their backcourt.

Q. You've been in this situation nine times prior to this, on the verge of winning a championship. Can you talk about the emotions you have right now? Is it nervous, butterflies?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Well, it's not about not looking ahead, and it's almost impossible because you have so many things that are prepped for this type of a game, so you really have to bear down on overplanning or prepping or thinking about anything but the game, just going out and playing the game and maintaining your focus at the present moment. That's basically what basketball is about, you can't get too far ahead. So in that regard it takes four games to win a championship, so we know that this is going to be a difficult game.
My experience, probably half the games we've had a chance to do it, we haven't succeeded as a coaching staff over the years, so we know how difficult a chore it is.

Q. And you're on the verge, as we've reminded you so many times, of a historic achievement here as far as career coaching championships. What would this mean to you?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Well, it's great to win a championship, regardless. Number-wise, it is a number. It is a figure I've attained, but I think it's really about these young men and what they're doing, and I'm trying to keep them focused there.

Q. You've canceled a couple shoot-arounds the last couple days here in town. Is that a fatigue thing or what's the thinking there?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Well, we're a distance away. The trip is a half hour at best, and that makes shoot-around a two, two and a half hour process, if not more if we have to do press. So it's a little less movement, especially in this type of heat, to have to run around. We're just in the Lazy River Water Park and going over to amusement parks. (Laughter).

Q. Do you worry if this series goes on, you might go broke from fines?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: It's a possibility (smiling). I think that those inner quarter discussions are quite unusual, seeing that they're an opportunity for a coach to give some candor to the game. So I'll have to watch my candor.

Q. Was Doris the one who prompted that? Did she get under your skin?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: No, I think there were some referees out there on the floor that prompted it more than others.

Q. How much money have you lost over the years, have you counted? Or does Jerry tell you, you just cost me another 25 grand?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: No. Sometimes he just says, "It's money well spent."

Q. When you canceled shoot-around, did you have any kind of a meeting at all in lieu of that?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Yes.

Q. Workout?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: We just had a salon in the hotel and just reserved a space for us to watch videos so we could acquaint ourselves with what we have to do defensively, and offensively too.

Q. There's been a mini-controversy surrounding the Magic, and not to draw you into that, but do you believe that team chemistry can be so delicate that the return of a starter after a long layoff can throw it off for a day or a week or whatever?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: We had Andrew Bynum come back to our team. It was a debatable issue. We were playing relatively well and we kept him out until the last two games of the season, or the last five games, whatever it was supposed to be. We felt it was a rather major impact on our team because it sets our team in quite a different order; Kobe moves to the guard position and Lamar goes to the bench. And we have these two seven-footers that play the power forward and center position that are both capable post players that sometimes gets it messed up, our spacing messed up. So we were concerned about it as a coaching staff and happy that we had an opportunity to do it before the playoffs began rather than during playoff season.

Q. So reintegrating can be a problem in the result down the road?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: I don't think it's as much of an emotional, mental problem as it is just the physical, reorienting yourself to the qualities of character of a player that's taking a place or one that's leaving a spot.

Q. You mentioned your guys might be a little overexcited. Do you take measures when you've been in that situation so many times before or do you just let it play itself out? Is there anything you try to do about it?
COACH PHIL JACKSON: Sometimes we sit and be quiet for a few minutes before a game starts, just kind of settle down. Rather than filling up our brain with information, just kind of let it spin out a little bit and quiet down. So we do take some moments sometimes of silence.

End of FastScripts

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