WNBA FINALS: PHOENIX VS. CHICAGO

October 17, 2021

James Wade

Chicago Sky

Game 4: Postgame

Sky 80, Mercury 74

JAMES WADE: All right, so my mom always told me, she was like, be humble. Be humble, all right. I want to respond to that with, mom, cut off the YouTube because I'm about to go in. I'm about to go in. Oh, my gosh, I live for this day.

Go ahead.

Q. Can you just speak to the resiliency of this team, especially in the second half of this game, making that run and doing what was necessary to get the victory?

JAMES WADE: We stayed together. I guess it was a microcosm of our season where you go down, you go down, and you keep pushing, all right. Crowd was quiet but they were in it, and they were trying to give us energy, trying to give us energy, and any little thing we did they gave us more energy and gave us more energy, and we fed off of it, but we stayed together.

By the end of it, once we made one basket, two baskets, the crowd took over, our players stayed together and they kept going, and you started to see who we were. It was a great moment because I never doubted for a minute that we were going to win that game. It was all a matter of when will we take the lead, and once we got the lead, I knew we would be fine.

Q. When I interviewed you when you first started with the Sky three years ago, you told me how you needed to get everybody to believe in the system. Three years later, how has getting them to believe in the system gotten you here?

JAMES WADE: That's a great question. Just me knowing what this team had, believing in every single person and knowing who our staff was and what they had to bring, and just knowing the game and being around winners all my life.

Q. I was wondering if you could take me through that fourth quarter, especially when Azurá [Stevens] fouled out. What did you make of how your other posts stepped up and responded?

JAMES WADE: She didn't foul out.

Q. Or when you took her out.

JAMES WADE: I took her out, she had five fouls. You know, Stef [Dolson], we've said it, from the Connecticut series, I told Stef that you're going to be big for us in this next series, so I need you to stay ready, and she was ready. She gave us some good, valuable minutes, and she leaned on BG [Brittney Griner] a lot throughout the game. So BG didn't have the same legs in the fourth quarter as she did in the first three quarters.

I don't know that that participated to her missing shots, but it definitely helped us out that she was an extra body that made it hard for her to get around, and her catches were a little more difficult. I mean, they have a great team over there, so we just wanted to make it as difficult as possible and just keep on pushing, pushing, pushing and not look for home run plays, and I think that's what we did.

Q. James, Courtney [Vandersloot] is the longest-tenured player with the Sky. She was drafted here in 2011 and this is a moment she's been fighting for her entire career. She said she wanted to win a championship with the team that drafted her. To share this moment with her given all of you guys' experiences overseas, here in Chicago, what is this moment for the both of you?

JAMES WADE: It's a special moment. The embrace that we had -- the first time I met with Sloot [Courtney Vandersloot] when getting the job, we met in a cafe, and I was like, we're going to get a championship. Don't worry, we're going to get a championship. So we went into detail of how we were going to do it.

I was just trying to get her to believe. I didn't know how we were going to do it, but I was just trying to get her to believe, and I knew that was the first step.

You know, if it's one thing I've learned in my life, living in this body for 46 years, I never count me out. And I will not be outworked. So if there was somebody that could do it, I felt like I was going to put us in a situation to do it.

But honestly, I didn't know we were going to win it when we were going to win it, but we were going to win one, so voila.

Q. Do you recall times just being in this arena and looking at the crowd and not seeing too many people and thinking, just even envisioning a time like this?

JAMES WADE: Well, since I got here, I think after the first three games, we used to be an okay crowd. Nothing like this, but I think it was more so in Rosemont. We had a pretty good record in 2019. I think in the second half of the season we started having more fans.

This year, of course, we started off with COVID restrictions, so it wasn't a lot of people, and as the time comes, we started getting more and more fans. But the Playoffs is nothing I've ever seen, and this has been amazing, and you can tell Chicago, like they're behind us 100 percent, and you felt the energy. Like you felt -- you actually feel the energy.

Now, this is how you make household names in your city. People are going to go around, they're going to know who Sloot is, they're going to know who Kah [Kahleah Copper] is. They already know who Candace is, but there's so many stories out there on the floor that are unique, that represent Chicago and what they mean to the city and what the city means to them, and so I just want those stories to be told, but winning a championship helped those stories be told.

Q. Going back to the game real fast, Allie Quigley just came alive in the second half. It wasn't even just the shooting, it's like what you've talked about before about the gravity of her pulling defenders off and freeing up somebody like Stef in the last minute of the game. Can you speak to the importance of Allie coming alive after she kind of struggled in the first couple games of the series?

JAMES WADE: Well, I mean, the odds are in our favor. For every off shooting game that she has, the next game is potentially going to be an explosive game. You never see a shooter like that stay cold. The fact that we were winning games while she was cold, it made me feel good.

We don't have to mess with her or tell her anything. She's a perfectionist, so she's going to correct herself and she's going to keep on working. It was a special moment to have her do it here in DePaul's shared space. Surreal. Surreal.

Q. I'd normally ask you about an X's and O's type question --

JAMES WADE: I know. We won tonight; you know that, right?

Q. Last year I think you opened up about life experience more than you had since we started covering the team, in the context of the world at large. Can you put this into perspective not as a coach but as a Black man from Memphis?

JAMES WADE: It's tough, man. Y'all try to make me cry a lot. I'm not going to do it.

Look, I had my family come, like I had my cousins and I had a lot of Memphis people come to the game. I had one of my high school teammates who I haven't seen in 28 years, I guess, since high school, came to the game, college teammates.

It's big to do something in this space, and I'm just going to keep it real, I've always had to prove my intelligence. Always. So how do you do that? You do that through hard work. And they say, okay, he's a hard worker, but the hard work gets your intelligence in the room. So once you work hard, people start to listen to you.

I understand that, and I've understood that from an early age, that I have to be different or not just different, just be visible and represent good visibility instead of - what's the word - routine or the visibility that they try to put on us. So it's important. It's been important, and it's going to always be important.

It's not just for my son. It's for every young Black kid that comes up behind me that you pre-judge because they have their pants down or they have their hat on backwards. You know what, and since I said that, why don't I put my hat on backwards and just represent that.

But never judge a book by its cover. I'm not perfect by no means, but I'm always trying to do the right thing, and it has nothing to do with my color. It has nothing to do with that at all or has nothing to do with the fact that I say "um" every three words. It's just the way I am.

I know the game of basketball, and, um, I know what it takes to be a champion, and here we are.

Q. It looked like Dan Hughes was seated kind of across from you guys' bench today. I was wondering what it meant to have him here for this game specifically and if you had a chance to talk to him after the game.

JAMES WADE: Yeah, we had a warm embrace. Dan was the first person who told me that I was going to be a great head coach, and I thought he was crazy as [expletive]. I didn't believe him. Me and my wife laughed at the idea, and then my wife said, maybe he sees something in you that you don't see. I don't know. God, I don't know.

To have somebody, especially a middle-aged white man who doesn't look nothing like you, doesn't come from your experiences, to say, hey, look, I believe in you. I thought I was going to be an intern for him for three years and he hired me as an assistant after the first year, and I have no idea why he did that.

He's an amazing man, and I don't think he'll get enough credit. He changed my life. He absolutely changed my life, and I'm forever indebted to him.

It's not an accident that a lot of his assistants are great head coaches, because he's someone that's going to always open up his wisdom to sharing and teaching you the right way. So I appreciated he was here, and it's going to mean something for me -- as much as my family was here, I needed him to be here today.

Q. I want to ask you about faith for a minute. You talked about that conversation you had with Sloot where you said you wanted her to believe. You didn't know exactly how you were going to get it done, but you wanted her to believe, but Sloot and Allie have stayed here for a long time when other people left because they have some kind of faith. Candace seems like she came here because she had faith in her vision. You guys had your faith tested at a few points this season. Can you just address what it meant to sort of keep the faith with this team and all the different ways that it meant that this year?

JAMES WADE: So now I can talk about how I grew up. I had no choice. Like I had no choice. You've got to have faith or you die. Like you're born behind the 8-ball, so you put that into all your experiences, and you show them how it's going to be done.

Faith is a big key for me. Faith is something you can't see; you've just got to believe it. It's something I can't explain. It's just in me.

You give it to them, and you sound crazy enough that they believe it. When I got the job in 2018, I still remember saying that we were going to win a championship. No idea how. We were coming off a team that was 10th place and no Playoffs, and you couldn't have told anybody after we finished in sixth that we were going to be the champions.

We did it because we believed. We probably did something that no other team has ever done. We just changed who we were because we wanted to change, and we decided to change, and here we are.

Q. Please comment if you can, you are the first Black coach to win a WNBA title. You've been talking about the significance; if you could speak on that, please.

JAMES WADE: I'm not the first. Corey Gaines [Phoenix Mercury] did it.

Q. But on the same team. You've been on two different teams.

JAMES WADE: I gotcha. I just wanted to give a shout-out to Corey.

I don't know. I don't know. Cheryl (Reeve), she gave me like a blueprint to win it, and I kind of just stole her cheat code, that's it. That's it. We haven't started yet, have we? Hey, you guys are holding up our party. Everybody is waiting on me.

KAHLEAH COPPER: I'm sorry to interrupt but we are waiting for the general manager, so we can celebrate.

JAMES WADE: Sorry, guys, I've got the MVP telling me I've got to get out. She'll tell you the story about the cafe one day. We fooled y'all. We know Kah was going to be MVP. Y'all just didn't know it.