NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: PISTONS v HEAT

May 27, 2005

Stan Van Gundy

COACH VAN GUNDY: Well, Dwyane was great, we knew that, and then again, I'm not really watching the film to see how impressive Dwyane was. That's not really my focus. Obviously he was extremely impressive. That doesn't really give me any coaching points.

COACH VAN GUNDY: Well, the key to me was that he rebounded the ball better. That was the key to me. I thought we played with real good energy offensively. We turned the ball over too many times, but most of it was in the first half. Down the stretch we executed pretty well. There's still a lot of things that we need to do better. I think we've still got to get a better handle on their post-up game. I thought we did a better job on their perimeters posted up the other night, but their bigs obviously were still a problem. Where we've got to do a better job getting out the 3-point shots; as you guys know, we've struggled during the year. That's been a problem. We need to protect the paint. I think we've done a pretty good job of that in the two games, but they have done a very good job shooting 3s, and I think some of those at least we can make better decisions and take away. But it is still going to come down to on the road, we are going to have to defend like we did for three quarters the other night for an entire game. We're going to have to rebound the ball the way we did the other night, and we're going to have to take care of the ball better. Those are always the things on the road. Look, we're still behind the 8-ball in this series. It's 1-1 but they've now got the home court, so we're the team that's fighting and scratching from behind at this point, and we can't let a good game the other night obscure that. We have to have a tremendous sense of urgency going up to Detroit on Sunday.

COACH VAN GUNDY: Well, if you look, to be quite honest, the road teams win more games in the playoffs than they do in the regular season, and for one thing, I think you get better in officials in the playoffs, so the atmosphere is not going to affect them at all, and that's no knock on the young guys, but it's tough going into that kind of atmosphere. During the year, some of those guys aren't used to it. These guys are all used to it. So that part evens out. And you're playing off better teams in the playoffs, and the better teams tend to win more on the road. So I think all those things come together. So it's tougher only in the sense that the atmosphere is even more amped up against you on the road, but if you notice, just go back and do the numbers for this year, I mean, there's a lot more road wins in the playoffs than there are in the regular season.

COACH VAN GUNDY: Well, I don't know. I think more of a confidence builder is we played well up there both games during the regular season. Again, they're a long time ago. I never know in the playoffs if anything that happened in the regular season means anything. I think our team has not lacked for confidence all year, home or on the road. We've obviously played better at home, won more games at home. That's pretty typical. But we're confident that we can go up there and get a win, but we know that it will take even better play than what we had here in Game 2 to get it done. This is a very good team playing on their home court.

COACH VAN GUNDY: Well, again, I've said this in all the first -- both the first two rounds and now the first two games here. What we're aiming to do against the great perimeter players is not to give them anything easy and live with the fact that they're going to make some shots. I think we've done a good job with Rip Hamilton with that. We haven't given him anything easy. He's probably looking and saying, you know, that we haven't done anything, that he's just had a lot of shots that he's missed, and both things are true. I think we've taken away his easy ones and he's probably had a lot of shots that he could go up there and knock down. Both things happen. You're not going to take those guys and shut them out. I know I'm certainly not smart enough to have a formula to stop Rip Hamilton, but we just want to take away his easy baskets and hope he doesn't have one of those great, great, great nights.

COACH VAN GUNDY: Well, I mean, I hate to say anything can't be stopped. Again, it's all a matter with teams of how much you want to do and what lengths you want to go to to stop a single guy, and the better that guy gets going, the more lengths people go to. I mean, if you are simply going to put two people on him all the time, yeah, then you can more than slow him down, yes. But that also creates shots for other people, and I know all of us coaches look at it as a team-wide thing. I don't know how Larry Brown is going to look at it. I don't know if he's going to look at it and say we've got to take him and shut him out totally and trap him all the time or if he's going to say, you know, we had the lead in the fourth quarter. So I've approached it both ways. I have no idea. We prepared for some things today that if they decide to be more aggressive in taking the ball out of his hands, give our guys a chance to make plays, but I would hope this time of the year we'll be prepared for anything that they throw out, that nothing will surprise us, and it will come down to how well we execute against it and how well they execute their defense.

COACH VAN GUNDY: Alonzo has made great contributions. I mean, he had two huge blocks down the stretch the other night. He's given us that defensively. I thought he did a surprisingly good job on Rasheed on pick-and-rolls getting out to the 3-point line, and he's always played with great emotion. It's always sort of teetering. It's great, it's intense and everything, but not fall off the highwire, that fine line that you hope as he's gone on in his career now and has a chance at this level of the playoffs that he understands, that the emotion stays very positive and it doesn't go over the top, and I think he does understand that, and he certainly has a lot of positives that help us.