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NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: CELTICS v HEATJune 7, 2012Erik SpoelstraBOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS: Game Six COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: I'll make this quick, all right. I will turn in my card in a half hour, 45 minutes. Everybody is ready to go. Chris Bosh will play. Q. Obviously, you've we've been talking over the last two days. Is there anything you have held back and saved for pre‑game or anything that you can share for us that is extra‑‑ COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: I think to this point we've talked a lot. We have a very confident group. We have a very stubborn group in there that, despite all the noise out there, we feel that we should have won the last two games. And we didn't. That's the result. But we did enough good things to win. We know we can win in this building. Everybody in that locker room is looking forward to this opportunity right now. Q. Anybody besides you going to address the team? COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: Guest speaker? No. Q. It's happened. COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: No. Q. How will you incorporate Chris‑‑ did you by any chance look at him before today? How did he look? Are you more comfortable with giving him more minutes? COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: Yeah, I'm much more comfortable. I don't think he'll be able to play his normal load, particularly at the pace, how competitive and how physical the series is. It probably won't be a normal rotation where you come in and play this amount of minutes, you sit for this amount of minutes, and you know you're going to sit that many. I would like to play him to the point where he's not quite to exhaustion, give him a break. It might be a shorter break than normal. Get him back in there. We might have to do that two or three times during the course of a half. Q. Have you thought about his minutes versus Garnett, whether you want him on the floor there to sort of keep Garnett honest defensively, or do you want him maybe not on the floor or against their other bigs‑‑ COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: We're not afraid of match‑ups by any means, but he has to be guarded. There's no question about it. You can't leave him open and you can't roam when he's on the court. Q. You and Doc Rivers have been charged with similar tasks of dealing with three superstars apiece. Can you just talk about the level of respect you have for Doc, not just as an X's and O's guy, but how he deals with his players. COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: I mentioned that before, I don't know, a couple of games ago. I had a chance to summer to spend a little bit of time with him at a coaching clinic. While he's highly regarded in his schematics and X's and O's, I was more curious about the management of personalties. That's really ultimately what it's about in this league. While all those other things are important, the day‑to‑day, how you motivate, how you manage all the different challenges and personalties is really probably the biggest part of the job. Q. (No microphone). COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: A little bit. I had an opportunity to at least share some stories. Both of us. It wasn't a long interaction. Q. Coach, Turiaf, (Indiscernible) he's not playing anymore. Did you see something that you didn't like? COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: Ronny Turiaf? Q. Yes. COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: No, not at all. Part of that has been Chris coming back. The other part was he tweaked his groin slightly, so I had to make that change the next game. But he's ready to go tonight. Q. Coach, there's been so much talk about you playing in the jungle and your terrible record here at The Garden.  What is your message personally to your players when facing those odds? COACH ERIK SPOELSTRA: Well, none of those other losses have any relevance now. If you want to pull history, we got a big one last year. But again, I don't know how relevant that is. We know we can win on the road. We've done it already in the playoffs. Especially in circumstances like this. I love the group that we have. I really do. I love looking in their eyes yesterday at the team meeting and seeing what's looking back at me, and even today's shootaround. These guys love these kind of moments. They don't like how we got to this moment, not at all. But they love these moments. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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