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NBA WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: WARRIORS VS SPURS


May 14, 2017


Manu Ginobili


Oakland, California - Postgame

Warriors - 113, Spurs - 111

Q. From your perspective, what did you see on the play where Kawhi got hurt? And how much do you think that impacted what happened to you guys down the stretch, obviously?
MANU GINOBILI: Yeah, well, it was huge. We need Kawhi to create, to score. It means a lot to this team, and we were doing really well. When he went down, the Warriors were starting to pick up, to feel good about themselves, to increase the pressure on everybody else, and that's when we struggled, because we couldn't have the guy that we run those plays and get them off their pressure.

So, yeah, we struggled a lot without him, and it's a tough break. He's coming from an injury on that ankle, and he tweaked it twice in the last minute he played so we couldn't react to his absence.

Q. Klay Thompson hit a couple big shots in that game, but generally didn't have a huge impact. I'm wondering, do you think that was -- how much of that was to do with what you guys were doing defensively against him?
MANU GINOBILI: He can't always play all great and make all the shots. Curry had an incredible third quarter, Durant's fourth and third. So, you know, they are human too, and they're going to miss shots once in a while. It would have been better if two of them missed shots, but it was only one. So, you know, it can happen to anybody, even if you're Klay Thompson. Even if you're Curry. One day you're going to [be] off.

So, no, no. I don't think it was something we did. I think in the first half we were very active, very attentive, rotating, switching and contesting, then in the second half when they got away from us, (No Microphone).

Q. To lose a game like this that you seemingly had control of through three and a half quarters, how does a team bounce back from that? You've been through so many of these wars. Mentally, how do you adjust? How do you bounce back?
MANU GINOBILI: It's the toughest part. It's very hard to react from a game like this. I was just saying that I always prefer to lose by 20 than like this. In which case, the home team relaxes a little bit, feels good about themselves and we are hurt. We are angry, and the opposite happened.

We played an outstanding game for half and a little bit. Then they came back. They overplayed us, they were more aggressive. They made more shots. So if it wasn't bad enough, we lost our best player that was struggling already with a bad ankle. So it's hard to see the positives, even though we were 20-something up. A very bad outcome of the game.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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