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NBA PLAYOFFS ROUND TWO: CLIPPERS v THUNDERMay 15, 2014Doc RiversLOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Game Six Q. (No microphone.) COACH RIVERS: I don't care about the fine. I thought it was deserved. It's one of the rare times you actually earned one. I don't mind that. You know, it is what it is. The funniest thing about the fine is my assistant Ann Marie got two calls from employees downtown that wanted to do a payroll deduct of $100 each to help me pay for the fine, which we obviously denied (laughter). But, you know, it is a thought. We can raise the money here if you guys all want to pool in. It would be very nice. Q. Do you have any idea how many fines you've had in your career? COACH RIVERS: I have no idea. Are you going to tell me? I don't know. You know, I have no idea. I can tell you who does know. Kris Rivers. She knows exactly, I can guarantee you that. Q. (No microphone.) COACH RIVERS: I think it is, yes. I will. I'll deduct it. It needed to be said and it was the truth. It was a call that should have went our way. That's been verified, as well. At the end of the day, like I said, I still look at us and say we made our own problems. You know, it should have never come to that. Q. How is Chris doing today? COACH RIVERS: He's doing better. He's doing a lot better. Listen, you know, it was a tough go. Yesterday I thought was his worst day, if you want to have a day. I think you know Chris. The guys who know him here, you know he's very intense, very aware. Sometimes you wish he wasn't. Al McGuire said, I'd rather have eight unaware players than aware players. I thought today he was so much better. He's a gamer. He'll be ready. Q. With your experience are you concerned or do you have any idea if a team like yours will come and play lights out or go the other way? COACH RIVERS: There's no experience that explains that. I really don't have any idea. You could have said the other day that Oklahoma, after we stole Game4, would have come out and played great. You just don't know. It's such a human game. I wish I knew better like when I can read guys, if they're ready or not. I think our team's really ready. We've watched film. We've kind of gotten over it. We made more mistakes than people know down the last four and a half minutes. We went over a lot of those. So, you know, we'll see. Q. Is there a player that you've coached or played with that reacted like Chris after a tough loss like that? COACH RIVERS: A lot of 'em. A lot of 'em. You know, we live in this time where our athletes a lot of times get criticized for not caring. I've always said it's so untrue. I think most of them care so much, they really do. If it had to happen to Westbrook or Durant, or even guys who aren't Westbrook, Durant or Chris Paul, guys care, man. Most of them do. Most of them would have handled them differently. Some aren't as emotional as Chris, some are more emotional. I've had so many guys. Rondo and Armstrong, I'm probably pointing to point guards, Rondo never showed you guys emotion, but his eyes were watered 50 times at the regular‑season games. It was one thing that the public doesn't know about athletes, I would say our athletes, that's it, they care far more than they let on. So, yeah, there's a lot of them. Q. How does the threat of elimination affect how you approach a game like tonight? COACH RIVERS: For me it doesn't at all. For players, as I said the other night, it's a very individual thing. As a coach, the only thing it does for me, it makes me more aware of what my players are doing, meaning if I feel like they're trying to do too much, then we have to have a talk. I think that's what gets teams in trouble in elimination games: I'm going to win it for us. Usually that doesn't go well in team sports. In boxing, that's probably the right way to do it. But in team sports, it takes you out of your team flow. So that's the only thing that I'll be very keen on. Q. Anything you do in particular to try to calm down your players? COACH RIVERS: No. I just think preparation makes you calm. If you feel like you're prepared, you're pretty calm. If you feel like you're unprepared, you're pretty nervous. Some of you guys went to college; you know that feeling when you go in the classroom and you've pretty much studied and you know all the answers, you feel pretty confident. But when you were out all night, you go to a test, you know how that feels. I think both teams feel pretty confident in that way. Q. (No microphone.) COACH RIVERS: No, no, it's not. Chris is smart sometimes. On that one, he just out‑smarted himself. They're never going to give it to you anyway. I think we're 0‑for‑however‑many‑times we've done it this year. We've talked about it a lot. Q. When you talked to the team on the plane, did you get a sense that you had to tell them, We need to talk now? COACH RIVERS: You know, I swear, I do what I feel. What made me do it personally was I just finished watching the game again on the plane. I wanted them to know how well we played. We played 44 pretty much flawless minutes. I thought they needed to hear that. We've had this thing, I talk about it in life, but I've talked about it with our team all year, especially with the stuff that's happened, about not playing the victim role. I said, We're not going to have that. I just wanted that to be clear, that we're either going to win it because we earned it or we're going to lose because the other team beat us. We're not going to play the victim role. That's what I wanted to make clear to them, that I was extremely intense on the plane about our play. I thought they needed to see that, because they needed to see that I was getting ready for the next game. Q. It's never good to get in foul trouble. There's good fouls and bad fouls. DeAndre got into foul trouble. COACH RIVERS: You know, he got one for throwing Perk down. I think he got two move‑and‑pick ones. But it doesn't matter. I don't know what you tell him on that one. I need him to be aggressive. Somebody asked about Blake the other day, Do you try to get a judge on how the games called? As a player, I wasn't smart enough to figure that one out. I played the same way. First of all I didn't call fouls when I played, so that was a lot easier. I just think it was one of those bad luck games for him. He was in the wrong spot every time the whistle was blown. That hurt us. Q. Housekeeping question. Last thing on your mind. A couple of your assistant coaches have come up with coaching vacancies. What do you think of that? COACH RIVERS: I think it's great. I've never not allowed my coaches‑‑ I know some coaches don't allow their coaches to interview. Tom Thibodeau interviewed the night before Game 6 finals once. I just think that's what we should do. They're all prepared. They're not going to not do their work. They're going to still have their same focus. Yeah, I think it's great. I think both of them will be great coaches. Q. Do you anticipate adjustments they may make in terms of your prep or do you go about doing what you do? COACH RIVERS: You think about it, I guess. So you anticipate it. But I've also learned you don't do anything until they do it. I think we all do that too much sometimes. We anticipate something that they are going to do because they couldn't stop something. You do what you think they're going to do, then you realize they didn't make a change. You're looking at your staff like, Well, we just tricked ourselves. I think you just kind of let the game start and then you read from there. Q. How concerned are you about DeAndre? COACH RIVERS: I'm not concerned at all. This is a different series. Every series is going to be different. They have big players on that other team. Golden State didn't. We felt like that was going to be a big advantage for us with D.J. and Blake. We rarely went small. We needed to stay big against Golden State because they needed to go small. Well, Oklahoma is as big as us, so there's going to be bigger bodies on D.J.  I'm not that concerned. I do need him to stay out of foul trouble, but I don't need to tell him to stay out of foul trouble. Q. Blake's various bloodied facial parts have been the storyline for him. How have you seen his play in terms of being aggressive? COACH RIVERS: I think he's gotten better and better in the series. I thought his best game was the last game. I think he's starting to figure out different ways to be effective offensively. I thought it was the most active that he had been throughout maybe the playoffs even with the last game, even though his numbers don't say it. He contributed to a ton of our baskets, with dribble hand‑offs, being involved in multiple picks. I think he's in a really good rhythm right now. That's usually very good for us. Q. You said you played 44 great minutes. What did you see in the other minutes? COACH RIVERS: Do we have to revisit it again? My gosh. We just broke our trust. A couple transition baskets, which nobody talks about, I think those are the two biggest plays in the game. Durant's quick layups and Jackson's quick layups. Both were our faults. We crashed the glass from the guard spot, something we drilled the team on the first day of camp that we release on a shot getting back. The problem is everybody wants to win. They want to win. We showed that. I understand we want to win, but you win by playing your rules. We broke our rules. Both of those buckets were the two key buckets over all that other stuff. Thank you, everyone. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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