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NBA FINALS: MAGIC v LAKERS

June 12, 2009

Stan Van Gundy

ORLANDO, FLORIDA: Practice Day

THE MODERATOR: We're now joined by Coach Van Gundy, and we will open it up to questions.

Q. Not all teams have that comeback capability in them, but because your guys do, how much faith does it give you to buck the odds?
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, it gives me a lot of faith, and I think that also the way these games have gone, you know, the last three, it's not like we're in a situation where we feel like we can't play with the Lakers and don't have a chance to win or anything else. I think our confidence level will be high. I think our guys have demonstrated incredible resiliency all year. I think they demonstrated it again last night with an awful third quarter, and for the Lakers to come back and take a lead and then we come right back and get back up five near the end of the game.
So we're a very, very resilient team, and I think I would expect us to play extremely well on Sunday.

Q. After a night's sleep, do you have anything more about the foul situation when you were up by three?
STAN VAN GUNDY: No, you know what, first of all, the assumption of a night's sleep is way off base, and the second thing is, I've rethought it and rethought it and rethought it, and it's easy to say now do I wish we had fouled as opposed to giving that up? Yeah, but I still don't think at 11 seconds to go in a game that we're going to foul in that situation. I'll put it this way: You always have regrets. Faced with the same situation again at 11 seconds, we still wouldn't be telling them to foul.

Q. You've been tough on yourself after some losses this year. I'm just wondering, I won't bring up the night's sleep, but when you've had time to reflect upon this, how much blame are you heaping on yourself this morning? You said tonight you were going to be haunted by this.
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, I mean, it's just such a tough game. I think that last night, again, I don't worry too much about the decision not to foul. About the only thing that sticks with me about my own as I think in general throughout the playoffs, in those situations like we've had late in the game, we've been able to come up with something on side out-of-bounds plays where we've been able to get a pretty good shot, and we weren't able to do that last night. That's frustrating to me as a coach. I think we've generally been good in those situations, and last night we weren't.
And we didn't play the play very well with 11 seconds to go. So I do reflect back on whether there was something else we could have said in terms of instruction that would have gotten us to play that play a little bit tougher, because he really got a lot of airspace on that to shoot the ball. So I question that a little bit.

Q. Do you look back, you trapped Kobe so far in the backcourt, do you regret not trapping him further towards the midcourt stripe? And were your guys told to push up above the three-point line there?
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, look, we didn't trap Kobe. What we did was we took the guy on the ball, put him on Kobe and never even let him inbound to the ball. And then Turk did a decent job of recovering back. That had nothing to do with the play because the ball went back to Ariza who was the inbounder, and then he got rid of the ball to Fisher. So had Ariza taken the ball and made a play or a shot, then I'd question that decision of denying the ball into Kobe, but I probably wouldn't question that too much. You're looking at 10.8 seconds, Kobe on the floor, I'm not going to question too much keeping him from getting the ball.
You know, basically Jameer had one responsibility on the play, and that was to not give Derek Fisher a look at a three. It's one of those things I'm sure Jameer wishes he had back and had played differently. I question whether we made that clear enough or could have told him to play the play a different way. But I thought we were pretty clear on that.

Q. You obviously didn't want to foul with 11 seconds to go, but what about at midcourt when it was down to six or five?
STAN VAN GUNDY: By the time the ball went through the net, it was 4.6, so I mean, I don't know when he shot it, but it would have had to have been around 6. Six or under would be about our time, so it would have been a tough play to make at that point anyway. I mean, he had to shoot it around the six-second mark, 5.8, 5.9, so that would have been a tough play to make at that point, I think. At least by our strategy, and I think fouling earlier than that, even though it didn't work out last night, I'm not sure I would change it. I'm not sure I'd be fouling. What's the difference, six seconds, seven seconds, maybe you would, but you're coming out of there at 11. That's awful early, and especially the way we've been shooting free throws in the game. I think it would have been pretty tough.
If you give them two, and now you come down and miss even one out of the two, now they're coming back at you with six seconds, only needing a two and Kobe Bryant on the floor and the whole thing. That's a difficult situation. So I just wouldn't have fouled that early.

Q. A lot of people are asking today what's the deal with Rafer and Jameer. You said after Game 1 that you played Jameer too many minutes and then he's in for however many minutes he was in at the end of that game. It just seems like an inconsistent stance on your point. Can you talk about that?
STAN VAN GUNDY: You know, I did think I had played him too many minutes coming out in Game 1. But this is a different game. We could not have played a worse third quarter than we did last night, and then I thought in the fourth quarter we had a group that was functioning very well on the floor together. We got to the five-minute mark. Around in there is when we were debating whether to bring Rafer back in the game. I had no problem with Rafer. The thing that I decided is that we had a unit on the floor that was playing well together.
Then the next time really that I really thought about it was the start of overtime, and then Rafer had sat for 13 minutes, and I thought that would have been a very, very difficult time to inject somebody new into it. So that's what happened.
Obviously in any kind of loss people are going to question anything; that's fine. But our fourth quarter unit functioned a lot better than our third quarter unit did, so I stuck with what was working.

Q. Along the same lines, and I know a lot of this is hindsight, but was there any thought of taking for defensive purposes, maybe taking Jameer out of that last defensive set and putting in Rafer or Courtney or whatever it might have been, to stick Fisher or whatever? I know it's all hindsight.
STAN VAN GUNDY: I'm not saying -- you give thought to everything, but I didn't specifically think about taking him out in that situation, no.

Q. And again, will the rotation with the point guard scenario, will you basically have to go with a feel for the game and not do what the standard -- taking a guy out somewhere at some point in the second quarter and seeing what happens?
STAN VAN GUNDY: I mean, we'll stick with pretty much the rotation we've had. I thought we got hit with a pretty extreme situation last night. I don't want to indicate at all that this was Rafer's fault, but we just played extremely poorly in the third quarter. I mean, that was as bad a stretch as we have had in this series, and so we were playing very poorly.
And then the unit we had in there in the fourth quarter got going and playing very well. I thought very well. And I did not want to disrupt that. That wasn't a change in rotation; that to me was an extreme difference between how one unit had played and another unit was playing. I wanted to stick with the unit that was playing much, much better.

Q. I was just wondering when Dwight talked last night about the two foul shots with 11 seconds, he was pretty, I'm not going to get down about it. I was wondering if you think there's going to be any fallout for him and how you kind of react to him basically saying, look, we all missed a lot of shots like that.
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, I think that he's right about that. Fallout from what? I mean, the guy put out one of the absolute great efforts that I've seen him make or anybody make, 20-plus rebounds, nine blocks, played his heart out and missed two free throws. As I said to somebody last night, I think it was John Denton, he asked him after the game if I was upset about the free-throw shooting. That's not something that I get upset about. I mean, there's nobody up there trying to miss a free throw in that situation. You might get frustrated by it and so do the players. We missed five out of seven in the last five minutes, five of our last seven, but that's not an execution or an effort thing. And so I don't want Dwight getting down about it, and there's nothing -- I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that he's not going to get down about it. I know he feels badly about missing them, but you know what, players even more so than coaches, they've got to have themselves in a position where they clear their head and are ready to bounce back and play a game on Sunday.
For whatever reason, Dwight is a guy with his demeanor and everything that a lot of people in the media have chosen to criticize, but if he gets criticized on that comment, personally I think that's ridiculous.

Q. Just wondering from a Laker perspective, they think, hey, they're up three to one, they're in control of this thing. Can you just talk about the fine line between winning and losing? A lot of people think you guys could be up 3-1 in this series right now.
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, there's always a lot of ifs. You have to deal with reality. We're down 3-1. But as far as -- I don't think there's anyone who plays, coaches or watches, commentates, writes in this league that doesn't understand the fine line between winning and losing in this game. It is a very fine line.
Obviously Game 1 was not a fine line, but every other game, it's been a very fine line between winning and losing, and it's what makes the business because it's what makes the games exciting, and it's also what makes them, when you lose them, so heart wrenching because it's not a huge difference in a game. It's all right there.
I thought our guys put everything they could into that game last night, and my number one feeling after the game was I just felt badly for them. I felt badly for our guys. I thought they put a lot into that game, just like they did in Game 2 in LA. You feel badly for them after games like that.
But I know they'll bounce back and be ready to go on Sunday. I know our guys think they're still in the series, and we'll be ready to play.
THE MODERATOR: Appreciate the time this afternoon. This will conclude today's conference calls with each coach.

End of FastScripts

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