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NBA FINALS: CAVALIERS v SPURSJune 9, 2007Mike BrownSAN ANTONIO, TEXAS: Practice Day Q. I'm curious, talk about Tony Parker. You were here a part of this team four years ago when he was helping the Spurs win a title. All the while there were the rumors that Jason Kidd, his opponent in that series, was going to replace him. Talk about his maturation and how he's handled the adversity to now where he's the major player on a championship caliber team. COACH MIKE BROWN: His growth has been tremendous, and anybody that is part of the Spurs' staff has done a great job, starting with Pop. He threw him out there into the lion's den and told him, hey, we want you to be our starting point guard. But it's tough to be the starting point guard in the NBA with any team, let alone when you have two future Famers in Tim Duncan and David Robinson on the floor. Tony handled it remarkably well. He's had growing pains, but he's been great the entire time. From Day 1 you could see the growth and maturity and his poise starting to develop and his confidence starting to develop from day one. Q. What's different about him now compared to then that you see as a coach? COACH MIKE BROWN: I think just his maturity level is obviously a lot higher than it was back then. Back then because he wasn't used to a lot of things, his confidence would waver from time to time. And again, the point guard position is the toughest position to play in the NBA, and when you have Tim Duncan on one side, David on the other side, and then you have some very good players around you and you're a scoring point guard, which is what he is, it makes it tough to be in that spot. But he handled it very well, and now he's extremely comfortable with his role. He knows exactly what he should be doing on both ends of the floor. And to me, not only -- to me that's the biggest difference. Q. Guys not getting their shots the way you wanted them to in the last game, some of the outside guys, was it guys' shots just not falling or were there things they can do to get in better position to get those shots? COACH MIKE BROWN: We've got to do a better job of driving the basketball and getting their defense to collapse because they're a great rotating team, and if you just catch the ball and swing it or catch the ball and put it above your head and then try to swing it without trying to collapse their defense, they rotate hard and they cover from one another very well, and they contest shots very well. So that had a lot to do with it as well as anything else. Q. Some of the other guys can do more -- you always talk about opening up the floor and that will give LeBron more room. Is there anything he can do to get them going that in turn would get him going? COACH MIKE BROWN: He's part of it, too. All of our guys have to do a better job of driving the basketball and making the simple pass, just driving at the next defender, getting that defender to collapse and making the next pass. Now when that guy swings the ball, that guy can't stand and survey the floor. At times he may not be able to catch and shoot, at times he may have to be the one to catch it, now he's having to close out coming at him, now he's got to put the ball on the floor and drive it and the next pass that he makes might result in a better look. We've got to have multiple driving kicks in most of our possessions as opposed [] to swing, swing shot or drive and kick shot. Q. Throughout these playoffs we've continuously heard about the greatness of Tim Duncan. I want you to talk about what it's like to coach against him and prepare for him and what are the kind of things that go into your mind as you prepare to coach against him? COACH MIKE BROWN: It's difficult because he's such a willing passer. When you're facing a superstar that is a willing and capable passer, it's tough because you know when you go to double-team him, no matter where you come from, he's going to have the patience and he's going to try to pick you apart. It's easy to double-team a superstar that wants to shoot first, shoot second and maybe pass third because you sell out, you aggressively double-team him and you put him under enough duress to where now he may not make that pass. But with Tim when you go to double-team him, his patience, his length, his passing ability, to not have to make the great play all the time but to make the simple pass to the next open guy makes it really tough. Q. Having said all of that, when you think about the game, being a student of the game, where do you think he ranks amongst the great big men in the game throughout NBA history? COACH MIKE BROWN: Right up there. Top three, if not one of the top guys. He's won multiple championships, he's got multiple MVP awards, and when you start adding those two things together and you look at his winning percentage since he's been here, he's got to be in the top three if not the top power forward ever. Q. Looking at the Game 1 stats, I noticed that San Antonio had 18 assists, your team had nine assists. What adjustments are you going to be making to be able to just jack up those totals? LeBron was handling the ball a lot, bringing up the ball. But towards the end of the game Gibson was handling the ball a lot and passing off to LeBron rather than the other way around. Is that something we're going to be seeing more of, the natural point guards handling the ball bringing it up? COACH MIKE BROWN: You know, we've been doing this the whole year. LeBron will bring the ball up at times, Daniel will bring the ball up at times. Our offense is one that any one of the three guards can bring the ball up. The one thing we don't want to do, we have to make some adjustments, but we don't want to go away with what we've been doing the entire year and entire playoffs just because we lost one game. We don't want to panic. It's one series, it's one day, one game at a time, and we respect that. But LeBron can handle it, Daniel can handle it, we just have to do a better job of having multiple driving kicks so we can get better looks at that basket instead of what we had in the first game. Q. Cleveland was one of the best offensive rebounding teams in the league regular season, but Game 1 badly out rebounded on the offensive boards by San Antonio. What key adjustments are you going to be making? COACH MIKE BROWN: Well, the first thing we have to do, we have to do a better job of boxing out when they shoot free throws. They had three rebounds off of missed free throws, and that hasn't happened to us all year. We might have given up one here and there but not three in one game. The second thing is we have to do a better job of getting the long rebound. Because we doubled Tim and he kicked it out, they shot a lot of long shots. Francisco also had a couple where he tapped them out to their guys. Our guards have to do a better job of making sure they're rebounding around their free throw area and we're not giving up second opportunities from that. Obviously the last thing is we've got to be a little bit more physical, our bigs do, when it comes to boxing out Tim and Oberto and other guys along the paint. Q. Concerning LeBron, isn't there almost too much over emphasis on drive and kick and double-teams? It seemed a lot of times Bowen was just backing off him from 20-foot range from the wings and he was just refusing sort of a wide-open jump shot there. COACH MIKE BROWN: No, he didn't have many wide-open shots along the perimeter. One of the things that they did in the first game was they had Bruce get up in them, and when he had the ball in the wing, they wanted Bruce to turn him two or three times before he got to the point. And then once he got close to that lane line, that's when they sent the house to double-team him. He got a shot blocked one time because of it. It was down by our bench on the right side of the floor. He had Bowen faced up and he's trying to get by Bowen, and Bowen did a nice job of turning a couple times. And when he got almost to the post he turned his back and goes almost to a post move, and by then Tim Duncan had come over the double-team. And same with Manu. They want to get up on him and force him to put the ball on the floor, same thing we did when I was here, and Danny Ferry started at the small forward for us. We had Danny Ferry guarding athletic, small forwards. Danny Ferry can't guard Rachel (laughter) with heels on. All we did was to tell him to get up into our offensive player and follow him right to Tim or to David, and they're basically doing the same thing. If he's open from the perimeter, he understands he's got to let it go. Q. It seems to me the Spurs not only want to beat you, they try to make you surrender psychologically. How does Pop get that instilled in them to be so tough minded? COACH MIKE BROWN: It's a culture that they've developed over 10, 11 years. They have a nice core of guys, all tough minded, and they've developed that culture year after year after year, and not only that, but with all the championships that they've won and all the success that they've had here. When you start winning, when you start having success, it gives you an inner confidence that's unbelievable, that you can't just say, hey, go win and hey, you're good. When you actually do it, the inner confidence is there and it makes you feel like you can just take the life out of individuals or out of teams. But we feel like we're a confident team. We've been down before 0-1. We know it's one day, one game at a time. So we're just going to keep chipping away at it. Q. What is your line in the sand with Larry Hughes in this thing in terms of keeping him on the floor versus him hurting the team because he's obviously playing on one leg basically? COACH MIKE BROWN: Well, it's the same thing. I think he played 23, 22 minutes in the last game, and that's actually -- his leg or his foot is a lot better than what it was the last three games against Detroit right now, and he's played about the same, if not less minutes, than probably what he had against Detroit. We're just going to keep monitoring him, and if we feel like it's too much for him like in the fourth quarter, I didn't go back to him at that time, then we'll sit him, whether it's our call, the doctor's call or his call. But the foot has gotten better, and he gave us productive minutes against Detroit. We're in a nice rhythm with the rotation that we have, and we'll continue to look at that. Daniel especially is in a nice rhythm coming off the bench, so we don't want to try to mess with that right now. But I understand Larry's injury, so does he, and it's something that we'll just continue to monitor. Q. Why do you think it's so difficult to get young guys especially to really commit to a defensive mentality when every year the teams that play the best defense wind up in The Finals? COACH MIKE BROWN: You know, I think it has a lot to do with most guys that get drafted out of college or out of high school. They're scorers. They're averaging a ton of points or they're shooting the heck out of the basketball. They're doing something offensively. Very few guys get drafted because they can defend or because they've committed to that end of the floor. So when you get a young guy that hasn't been asked to play a ton of defense because their teams needed them to score every night, it's a different mindset, especially with them going either from high school or from -- excuse me, from college, to the NBA and guarding veteran NBA players that know every single trick in book, it makes it that much tougher for them to handle, deal with and so on and so forth, especially their rookie year or their first year. Q. Why do you think teams don't draft guys who are really good defensive players coming out of college, or at least sign them as free agents early on, if that's what ultimately wins championships? COACH MIKE BROWN: Well, I think what you can do, a lot of times you can find your, quote-unquote, defenders in the minor leagues. After they've had a chance to be out of school two or three years, to work on either shooting the basketball or an offensive skill, you can go find those guys that are hungry and that haven't been given anything that want to go take it every single night. It's tough to find guys that can shoot, guys that can score, especially at this level. As a coach, you think defensively you can always try to get a guy to play harder, to bring more effort. And you can always teach a guy how to defend within a system, if you have a system. So sometimes those great offensive players, you feel like you can teach them to defend. It might take a little bit of time, but you can teach them to become defenders within the system and be very effective, at least that's my philosophy on it. End of FastScripts |
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