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NBA FINALS: MAGIC v LAKERS

June 9, 2009

Stan Van Gundy

ORLANDO, FLORIDA: Game Three

Los Angeles Lakers Â– 104
Orlando Magic - 108

Q. Talk about the composure that your team demonstrated as well as yourself after losing the nine-point lead. What did you tell your team?
STAN VAN GUNDY: I do not think in my entire life I've ever demonstrated composure, but thank you very much.
I've said it throughout the season and throughout these playoffs, the one thing that you can't question with our team is their resilience in situations like that, whether it's from game to game, minute to minute, our team will keep playing. We have bad games like Game 1, but it's never a matter of our resilience or quitting or anything else. We just got into a stretch there where we struggled to score and we turned the ball over. That's sort of been our downfall. It was in Game 2. We hit stretches where we'd turn it over two, three times in a row and then make it back. We've got to play better.
But yeah, I felt we held our composure pretty well after we gave up Ariza's three, and I went crazy on Turkoglu.

Q. They just said 65 percent was the best shooting percentage in NBA Finals history. What was going well?
STAN VAN GUNDY: Ball was going in the basket. That always works. That is a tried and true formula. We've shot 29 percent. Is that the lowest in history?

Q. Second lowest.
STAN VAN GUNDY: We tried, and then 62 is the highest. I say this all the time, this is a crazy game, it really is.

Q. The guard play in particular?
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, the guard play was great. Rafer got off to a good start and played very, very well, played with great confidence. We still turned the ball over too much I thought, but the guard play was clearly much, much better. Pietrus I thought gave us a huge lift off the bench. I thought one of the biggest baskets of the night was his follow dunk there at the end. We were struggling a little bit, didn't get a great look at the basket and then he comes in and follows that up. I thought that was maybe the biggest shot of the game.

Q. Can you talk about why you think Rafer played so much better. And as far as the struggles in the first two games, how much of that would you attribute to just integrating Jameer Nelson into the lineup?
STAN VAN GUNDY: I wouldn't attribute any of it to that. You have good games and bad games. Rafer has bounced back well in the playoffs before. He's had great games in the playoffs, and he's had some other games that weren't as good. That's just sort of the way it goes. I mean, again, I don't think there's any big psychological mystery to the whole thing.

Q. It did seem like you were getting more good shots like you figured out how to run an offense against these guys.
STAN VAN GUNDY: You never know. I've got to go back and really look, but when the ball goes in, those look like really good shots, and when they don't go in, you say, wow, they're not getting any good shots. When the ball is going in 62 percent of the time, yeah, those are great shots.

Q. You made a great percentage, didn't take as many threes I don't think. You got to the free-throw line a bunch, but a lot of shots inside the arc and driving the ball.
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, again, I would hope that we are a team, or try to be, and I think most teams are like this, this isn't some -- I'm not smart enough to come up with something real sophisticated. But you would hope that you're trying to take what the defense gives you and that you're always designed to attack the basket for us on a post-up or a pick-and-roll, and if they spread out to try to take away the threes more then you've got room to throw the ball or drive it inside to Dwight, and if they stay in the paint, you get open shots and hopefully knock them down. It's the way we've played all year really for two years, and when we take 30 threes in a game, people write live by the three, die by the three, can't win that way, everything else. That's the way we play and we're not going to change. What you hope is you're making the right decisions, handling the ball well and taking good shots. We're not going to decide, though, we've got to get it in the paint or we've got to take the three.
If you look at them, we did the same thing. We try to pull over on Kobe's pick-and-rolls, he's throwing the ball out and Ariza and Fisher are shooting threes. I think that's what good, smarter teams do. You space the floor correctly, you make the right decision and you take the shot that's there and you live with it.

Q. When Rafer was coming off the court, when they got him on TV he said something about you giving him a little bit of a pep talk before the game because he didn't seem like his usually happy-go-lucky self.
STAN VAN GUNDY: I'm a motivational genius, that's what I am (laughter). I thought for two days about what to say to him, and I said, "play your game." You can write that down. That's a quote. It took me two days to come up with that.

Q. Pietrus' steal off Kobe down the stretch, what did you see and how was he able to do that?
STAN VAN GUNDY: I thought he did a really good job and Dwight did a really good job. They got him trapped. We had him trapped one other time, and I guess we fouled him. But I thought we got a couple of good traps on him. You've got to make sure that you really keep your hands back on all of his traps. You don't want to touch him at all. We got a really good trap then and he just lost the ball. He's a great player, made every other play down the stretch, and he lost the ball. Then Mickael went down and made both free throws, obviously very, very big.

Q. Pietrus has surprised some people with his play in the playoffs, big series against Cleveland, obviously great tonight. Has he surprised you guys at all by how well he's played?
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, I wouldn't say surprised, but look, what happened with Mickael is if you go back to the beginning of the year, he started the year well, playing a lot like this. And then he just went injury, play a few games, injury, play a few games, injury, play a few games, and not only was he ever not able to get into a rhythm but he was never really integrated with us, and that's why we eventually put him on the bench because we thought it was getting disruptive to have him in and out of the lineup. We thought it was easier to have him coming in off the bench.
Now he's played I don't know how many straight games counting the playoffs, but he's played for a long period of time with us. I think especially when you come to a new team that's very helpful, not only for him but getting his teammates involved. He's just in a real good rhythm. Obviously the pressure doesn't bother him at all, and you sort of laugh sometimes because all of us, coaches, players, you guys in the media, attribute so much to like experience and playoff experience and everything else. He played in Golden State, they won one series, and he barely played out there. So this is it, his first time through in the playoffs, his first time, Courtney's first time. Not many of our guys with a lot of experience.
As I say to them all the time, they've all got basketball experience, and these international guys have played in huge games that mean a lot to their country. So he's obviously not fazed by this, and I think that's a great thing.

End of FastScripts

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