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NBA FINALS: MAGIC v LAKERS

June 6, 2009

Dwight Howard

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Practice Day

Q. Phil Jackson was in here earlier and was asked what's the biggest misconception about Kobe Bryant, and he said, that he's a nice guy, because he's not. You got to know him over the course of last summer. I want to know your opinion on whether he's a nice guy or not.
DWIGHT HOWARD: Is he a nice guy? Kobe? Yeah, Kobe is a nice guy. You've seen him. We've all seen him. He's a very nice guy. He's a great team player, one of the hardest working people you'll ever meet. So yeah, he is a nice guy. He's a good person to be around.

Q. Is there one thing from your Olympic experience about him that really sticks in your head, in your mental memory?
DWIGHT HOWARD: Sometimes he goes crazy on the floor. Yeah, I just remember that, how focused he gets, when he has that killer instinct look. You probably seen it last game. It's a sight to see.

Q. When you say sometimes he goes crazy on the floor, forget about Game 1 of the Finals, give me another example.
DWIGHT HOWARD: That describes it. He goes crazy. He starts making unbelievable shots, he plays great defense. That's all the things he does best, especially when he's focused.

Q. You talked to Bill Russell before the last game and I definitely can see you guys have a relationship. I heard you had told him maybe at All-Star that we had to go through the Celtics and you had told him that a couple months earlier. Talk about that, and also what he means to you.
DWIGHT HOWARD: Well, I told him if we wanted to win the championship you've got to beat the team that won it last year. He started laughing and joking, because he knows how tough the Celtics are. We want to be champions. We believe that we have a chance to win the championship. I just told him we've got to go through the Celtics to win the championship.
As far as Bill Russell, he's one of the few big men that I've always looked up to, him and Wilt, and they were the only two big men that I always wanted to meet besides Patrick, and I never had a chance to meet Wilt, but probably the closest person to Wilt was Bill Russell. He's probably the only book that I ever really enjoyed reading, one of his books, "Russell Rules" was one of the few books that I really enjoyed. It brought me a little bit closer I would say to him just by reading that book and knowing who he was off the court and how he approached the game of basketball. He was always about team first, and that's one of the -- basically I'm the same way. My team, that's the only thing that matters to me.

Q. Obviously him playing so long, long before you were born, have you ever even seen any tape or are you just going off of what you read, stories?
DWIGHT HOWARD: I've seen a couple highlights of some of the tremendous things that he's done on the floor, 30-something rebounds, 40 rebounds. It's like unheard of these days for a guy his size to be able to do that and do it on a consistent basis says a lot about his work ethic. How you approach the game of basketball is one of the areas that I really want to get better at, some of the things he did and how he approached the game on the defensive end, blocking shots. He was a real student of the game, and that's one thing you can always learn from a guy like Bill Russell.

Q. How helpful have the coaches, especially assistant coach Brendan Malone about defending Kobe? How helpful have those been?
DWIGHT HOWARD: It's only one game, so you can't really tell, because that game he had an amazing night. But I think the biggest thing with Kobe, you have to try to apply as much pressure as you can to him. When he's able to roam around and get into a rhythm, he starts making shots, he's getting to the lane, he's finishing, he's very tough at that point. The biggest thing is get into him and forcing him to pass the ball.

Q. And having Coach Malone who worked on defenses against Michael Jordan and some of the great players, how much does that help in general?
DWIGHT HOWARD: Brendan is a very smart man. I think he's the only person on our team who has a championship, so he knows what it takes, especially on the defensive end. That's the only thing -- that's what he's been preaching all year, defense, defense, and being in the right spot and really knowing your opponent.
For the bigs, every meeting we have as a big, he's in there. The one thing he asks of us is that we know our opponent, know their tendencies and find out ways to stop them. So he's big on defense.

Q. Obviously the franchise has only played five games in The Finals and hasn't got a win yet. What would it mean for you to get that first Finals win? And do you think the experience, The Finals experience, that Los Angeles has, do you think that helps them more?
DWIGHT HOWARD: Well, at this level, at this time I think the only thing that will help a team, as you can see, between the two teams in Game 1, like I've been telling you guys, is effort and energy. In every series it seemed like the team that we played against had more experience than we did. Boston, they won the title. So in that series they had more experience. Cleveland has been to The Finals so they had more experience. But it all boils down to who wants it more. Who's going to go out there and play with effort and energy. That's what we have to do, we have to play with a lot more effort than we did in the first game, and the outcome should be a lot different.

Q. You talked about steppingstones. How much would it mean to you to get that first Finals win under your belt?
DWIGHT HOWARD: Well, I think it would be great for us as an organization. Our goal wasn't to make it to The Finals and win one game. We want to win the whole thing. We believe we will win it. We don't want to come in thinking, oh, let's just get one game and we're happy with just winning a game.

Q. We were talking to Andrew Bynum about the strongest guys in the league, and he mentioned you. He also mentioned Kwame Brown. Are there any guys you go against that are really strong that we might not think of?
DWIGHT HOWARD: My twin, he plays for the Lakers, DJ Mbenga. He's pretty strong. Kwame, he's very strong. The guy on Orlando, the Big Fella, he's pretty strong, No. 12.

Q. Gortat, right?
DWIGHT HOWARD: No. 12. Gortat, he's pretty strong. There's a lot of strong guys in the league. It's tough to name them all. But if you want to go based on the two teams here, they have a lot of strong guys. Drew is pretty strong, big guy. That's about it.

Q. You said in a recent interview you're at like 20 percent of where you're going to be. What's that 80 percent potential? What are the parts of your game that you're going to work on?
DWIGHT HOWARD: Shooting. I think shooting is going to be very key for me, really open up my game. I think mentally staying focused for 48 minutes. There might be times during games where I might miss a box-out or two. That comes with age, also. But I think as much as I can learn about the game now, watching film, studying my opponent, you know, those things will come for me.
But I think just shooting the ball will really open up my game. When I say I'm 20 percent there, there's a long way for me to go. I don't think I've reached my prime or even began to really be myself on the floor. There's a lot of things that I do well and some things that I'm not as confident as I should be with on the floor. Once I'm more confident in the other areas of my game, that's when I think my game will get better.

Q. What, if anything, did the Lakers do defensively to you in Game 1 that caused you to struggle like that? And what sort of adjustments do you think you have to make in Game 2?
DWIGHT HOWARD: I don't think I was patient enough in the post. I don't think that they caused a lot of problems for me. I think it was just rushing and wanting to do so much without being patient. I think out of all the games I've had in the last two playoff series, I was probably the most impatient the last game.
I have to slow down, slow down. When they come down and double, pass it out to my teammates and trust that they'll make the shots. And also when I have the ball in the post, really just read where the help is coming from. I don't think I did a good job of that during the game. I've talked with the coaching staff and I've talked with the players who have seen what was going on on the floor. I've seen it, and the think the biggest thing for me is just being patient. I don't think they bother any of my shots, it's just a matter of being patient and allow the offense to just flow throughout the game. I didn't run like I normally run during any of the games. So they had an opportunity to get back and load up. It's tough to score with a crowd.

End of FastScripts

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