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NBA WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: THUNDER v SPURSMay 26, 2014Manu GinobiliOKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA: Practice Day Q. Pop says you may miss the rest of the Playoffs. (Laughter). MANU GINOBILI: No, I won't. Q. Are you feeling okay? MANU GINOBILI: Yeah, yeah, I'm a little sore, but nothing worth talking about. Q. Last night your shot was falling but nobody else's seemed to be. Is that something they were doing or just one of those nights? MANU GINOBILI: It was a combination of things. We were not sharp enough offensively to find open teammates, so every shot was a little more contested and uncomfortable, and besides that, they brought all they had. They knew they were in a tough situation. They needed to win this game. There were a lot of emotion, the fact that Ibaka was back really drove them, too. The fans, of course, they had a lot of energy. They played better, and we were a little lagging behind. We were not as intense as they were. I think that could really summarize the whole game more than Xs and Os or shots made or not. Q. Are there adjustments to make, or is it just doing what you do better? MANU GINOBILI: I think the most important thing is, at least what I think, is to realize all the mistakes we made, and with all those mistakes we were pretty close for most part of the game, so we made mistakes pretty obvious that we didn't make in the first two games. We understand that if we don't bring our A game, we don't play our best game, we're not going to win here. Hopefully that lesson was learned yesterday. Q. Do you realize you guys have lost six in a row against the Thunder when they've had Serge in the lineup. What's the level of concern? MANU GINOBILI: I think he was great for being out for 10 days or whatever and coming back from an injury. He was great. I think he helped them to be more aggressive, and they felt backed up by another player. He made the jumper and all that. But I think the difference was in intensity, as I said before, not who played and who didn't. They were more aggressive than us.  They were more attentive. We were always slow. It felt like we were slow. So I think that was the bottom line. Of course it helped them because he gives them things that they didn't have in the previous two games. So we'll try to play better and see after that. Q. How do you explain the dropoff for you guys? You're such a professional veteran group that knows how to win, so when you have those games like last night, where does that come from? MANU GINOBILI: It's the mysteries of the human head, the mind. I'm pretty sure we wanted to win. There's nothing that I wanted more last night than to win, and I don't want to go to a Game 7 against them, but things happen. Every game is different. Sometimes they have more fire than us, and maybe a little thing happened in the first minute that changed‑‑ there are so many variables in a basketball game, but for sure we wanted to win the game. We just couldn't match up their aggressiveness. Q. Tony was pretty hard on himself last night after the game. Did you guys say anything to him or do you worry about that at all? MANU GINOBILI: No, I didn't say anything. I don't think anybody said anything. Maybe Pop, of course, but he knows he didn't have a good game. He's done it before. I've done it before, and after so many years, so many big games, Finals and everything, you know what to do, how to come back and play a better game. We are beyond that point that somebody got to come and tell you something. He's a super pro. He's had an unbelievable season, so he's going to bounce back. Q. Brooks made a lineup change last night. There was a time not that many years ago when Pop would give you a start to shake things up. Are those days gone forever? MANU GINOBILI: I don't know. It happened last year, too. So we'll see what he thinks. It makes sense for‑‑ it made sense for them. They needed to shake things up. Plus they come back from Ibaka, so I think they needed to see something different, and I guess it worked. They played a good game, and we'll see how the Xs and Os thing goes from now on. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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