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NBA FINALS: LAKERS v CELTICS

June 13, 2008

Doc Rivers

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Practice Day

Q. I know you've talked a lot this year about how much Ray has had to sacrifice his game for the other guys, probably more than anyone else. But can you talk about how much he has been able to change what he does, maybe recognize things in his game that he didn't necessarily know existed as much?
DOC RIVERS: Yeah. I mean, he's been great all year. You know, like I said before, I thought -- Kevin you can put in any system. He's just such a versatile player. And Paul had basically been in a system. So Ray was a guy that really had to sacrifice the most. I think really he's learned a lot through this year.
He had been a player at times that, in Seattle especially, when the ball touched his hands, it basically stopped and he got to decide from that point on what happened. You know, it's just not how we've ever played or I've ever coached, and I just thought the ball movement is the key to winning.
You know, to his credit, he's done it. He's struggled with it at times, but he's done it. You know, now he's learning through the offense how to get the catch-and-shoot shots, how to move the ball and get it back and get into pick-and-rolls. So he's been fantastic in that.
Even at this stage of his career that he's been able to do that and sacrifice to be able to do that has been tremendous. And then on the other end I think he's been more impressive. He's never been known as a defender, and he's been fantastic in this series guarding Kobe, even though guarding Kobe is tough, and throughout the playoffs. So yeah, I'm very happy for him.

Q. He called off the pick last night, took it to the hole. I mean, is he much more inclined to do that sort of thing?
DOC RIVERS: Well, he actually likes picks more, and I liked his thought process. He liked the match-up because of the spacing. We had all shooters on the floor, and instead of bringing another defender in that they can trap, Kevin may have been the roll guy that was open, but may not have been. He liked his chances in the one-on-one situation, feeling that if he did beat him off the dribble, it was a great chance that there would be no help, and Ray was right in the decision.

Q. Ray Allen said last night after the game that it meant a lot to him when he heard Paul Pierce say that he wanted to guard Kobe, really said a lot about Paul, and will we see that match-up again tomorrow?
DOC RIVERS: Well, you'll see everybody on Kobe, just like it's been. I don't think one guy can guard Kobe throughout one entire game. I'm sure Ray was extremely happy when Paul said that because that meant that he didn't have to guard him for a while (laughter). You know, truth be told, it probably is the reason Ray was able to play 48 minutes.
You know, if he had stayed on Kobe throughout the game, I don't think he would have been able to get through the entire game.
The fact that Ray had strength at the end of the game, I thought, had a lot to do with Paul guarding Kobe, and that allowed Ray to get some rest.

Q. A lot of guys want to be the one to take the shot, but here's a guy, one of your best players, that wants to be the shut-down guy.
DOC RIVERS: Well, we've preached it all year, and we talk about it all the time, that for us to win games, it's going to be the guy that gets the stop and the team that gets the stop, not the guy that makes the shot. And the fact that Paul wanted to do that is great.

Q. Two questions: One, can you tell us the story behind the story of taking the big three out on the duck tour, the parade route before the season began? That, and do you realize that the coaching job you did last night was one of the greatest coaching jobs of all time?
DOC RIVERS: I can answer the second one. I don't realize that and I don't know if that's true. The way I look at coaching is the players make the shots at the end of the day.
But the duck tour was just -- you know, hell, I had been sitting in that apartment watching the freaking duck tours where the Red Sox go on them and Patriots have been on them, and I just thought it was important for the Celtics, those three guys, because through them you can sell it to the team. I just thought it was important that they saw the route. Paul knew about it. Paul has been in Boston for so long, but Kevin and Ray, I think they thought we were going on a historic trip of Boston. I don't think they really got it at first until we explained to them what we were doing.
It was a fun trip. I'm glad we did it.

Q. Obviously you and your dad shared a very special relationship throughout your life. Have you been able to take a moment or two in this run, especially on a Father's Day weekend, to think about? A, what it would have meant for him to see you here and on the cusp of this, and the lessons that you learned from him, what are a couple things that have always sustained you that you took from your dad? We can come back to that, if you want to.
DOC RIVERS: (Silent pause). Yeah, that's just a tough one for me to talk about.

Q. I know you don't want to look forward, but if you'd please indulge us here with kind of an eye on history, might you coach this next game with a cigar in your jacket pocket?
DOC RIVERS: No (laughing), I will not. I do -- I mean, Red is always on our mind, obviously. But no, I won't do that. As far as we are concerned, we have to win a game, and the next game is our focus.
You know, it's very important for us that when you look at this series, any of the games besides probably Game 2, even though they came back, could have gone either way. So this is a close series in our minds.
We have to just focus on that process. We can't look at anything more than that. I think it's very important for our team.
To go back to my dad, he's just very important in my life. It's still very difficult for me to talk about because I haven't had a lot of time, really, to reflect on it. You know, it happened during the season unexpectedly. It's very, very difficult. But I do think about it. I think about it a lot.

Q. Getting back to Ray, when he went through that slump there in the second round, especially against Cleveland and Game 1 against Detroit, people were wondering what happened to him, what happened to his shot. How did he handle that, how did he get through that, and talk about his attitude and the way he's now playing.
DOC RIVERS: I thought he was great. I thought Ray was -- you know, it's difficult for a great player to struggle at all, and especially to struggle on a big stage and hear about that he doesn't have it and all that. You know, I just kept telling Ray, just do what the team needs and don't try to get yourself off. Try to just keep making plays for the team, and it's going to come; it's going to happen, it's going to break for you. And it did, and so I'm very happy for him.
A lot of players I don't think could have done that, and Ray saw the bigger picture than the picture of him, so it was great for him. He's a great shooter. You don't forget how to shoot, and you knew that. He needed a couple to go down for him, and they started going down. Once they started going down, you felt really good about it.

Q. What do you know about coaching a team in the playoffs and in The Finals that you didn't know at the beginning of all this?
DOC RIVERS: I don't know. It's still just a game at the end of the day. What you know is your team. You don't know the other team; you don't really know the other coach. You respect the other team, and obviously I have a tremendous amount of respect for the other coach.
Having said that, at the end of the day, I'm coaching my team, and it doesn't matter if we're in the parking lot or Game 1 in the first round or Game 7 or 6 or 5 or 4 in The Finals. You're just coaching your team.
There's more of this, and there's clearly more attention paid to decision-making and all that, but it still doesn't waver what you do. You're going to do your job and the best that you can, and if it's good enough, great. And if it's not, as long as you felt like you did your best, that's all you can do in these things.
That's what I've told my players throughout this series, just do your job and let's hope it's good enough.

Q. What part of this job of coaching do you do best in relation to your team?
DOC RIVERS: Oh, I don't know. I have a great relationship with the players, and I just ask them to sacrifice. I know it's difficult. I think everybody wants to play. When we moved guards around yesterday from Rajon to Sam to Eddie, a lot of teams you would have seen guys throwing tantrums and all that, and our team has been good that way all year.
We've decided each game as an individual game, and whoever fits our team that night to help us win is going to play. That's all you can do.

Q. You played against and coached against Michael. And you know that Kobe always gets compared. He takes three shots -- three points the first half, no baskets last night, you know that. He winds up getting criticized by some people for not taking over the game. From your perspective as an opponent and an observer, what do you expect out of a guy like that and how fair is it for him to have to carry that kind a burden?
DOC RIVERS: It's not fair. I said it before the series started. I've never seen a guy this talented get criticized as much as he does. It's just completely unfair. He's a great basketball player, the greatest player right now in our league and probably top three or five in the history of the game in a lot of ways.
He is, he's just a criticized player. When you look at the shots he made down the stretch of the game last night, he only does it every night. He's just a terrific player. He's driven like no other, and I think his drive -- Will Perdue is back there. I know at times Michael got on his teammates, too, and that's what all the great ones do. But when they do it and things don't work, they're usually the guy criticized for it.
I don't know. I love him as a player. I don't know Kobe very well as a person, but when I've been around him, I've loved him that way, too.

Q. It took Michael seven years to win a championship. In your observation of it, was there a point where you saw something in him that he had kind of calibrated it and figured it out to get him over the hump, and is Kobe in need of that or not?
DOC RIVERS: Well, he's won three already, so he knows how to win. He's been a winner, and that's why -- we're up 3-1 and we know that we have a lot of basketball to play because Kobe is on that team. He's the scariest player in the NBA, in a lot of ways, so you're fearful of him all the time. You should be, a respectful fear.
Having said that, I don't know, I think that Kobe has shown that he can trust his teammates and he's done that. He has shown he can be the best defensive player in the league. I don't know what else he can do.

Q. When people made their predictions for this series, were a lot of us too guilty in looking at what happened in the first two rounds of the playoffs and maybe forgetting about the whole body of work, what you guys looked like for the five months previously?
DOC RIVERS: Well, we caused it. We didn't play well in the first two series. I thought it was great for us in the long run, I really do. I said that at the time.
We really hadn't been through anything as a team. We kind of went through the season, we had a little blip right at the All-Star break on the West Coast trip. Other than that, we hadn't really had anything to fight through.
That Game 5 against Atlanta and Game 7 against Atlanta, the Game 5 against Cleveland and Game 7 against Cleveland was great for us, now that we won those games. But I did think it helped our team, and it helped me see how guys reacted in those situations, as well. So if they come up again, you're better equipped to get through it.
The Lakers are a fantastic team, so we didn't find that as a slap that people, most picked the other team. That didn't bother us.

Q. When you got by Detroit, was there any sense you just beat the best team you had to beat, or did you think the Lakers were better than Detroit?
DOC RIVERS: Well, we'll find that out. I'll give you that answer hopefully some other time.

Q. Can you talk a little bit about Eddie House, what you thought you were getting when you signed him, a guy who played for seven teams, seven years, a guy who was able to sit there and not play at all for two games and then come in and do exactly what you need him to do? What's the mentality?
DOC RIVERS: Shooters shoot. I had practice with Eddie this morning, and we were talking about that. He said, listen, you know me, when I come in, if the shot is open, I'll shoot it. That's what I do.
That's true, that's who he is. He can shoot the basketball. He knows he can shoot the basketball, and he knows when he comes in that's probably why we're bringing him in is to shoot the basketball, so he's very comfortable in that role. He has the greatest role of a team player that you can have when you think about it. When you're open, shoot the ball with no hesitation, and that's what he does.
What I'm very happy with him, though, is last night especially, we were able to keep him on the floor through pressure and he was able to get us in our sets. That's something -- that's the reason he hasn't played point a lot in his career, and he did that last night with Farmar's pressure. Farmar is a terrific defender, so that's where I was happy with Eddie.

Q. And yet he hasn't been able to stick with other teams and he sees Sam come in, and for a while Sam had been getting minutes.
DOC RIVERS: Yeah, and that is due to point guard play. He's proven here and there that he can. There's games in the playoffs where the pressure obviously against Lindsey Hunter, that bothered him, and we've had to take him off the floor. If we feel we can run our offense with Eddie, he's always on the floor. But it's when teams take us out of it due to Eddie that he can't.
The other thing Eddie has done that every coach in the past has told me is that he won't defend.
He's been a great defensive player. He was terrific last night with his energy. You know, at the end of the day, I think a lot of these guys, when they decide to just have one single-mind sacrifice for the team and stop thinking about individual stuff, they become pretty good basketball players.

Q. In the past or last year, your coaching ability was questioned. Now there's whispers and statements that you're out-coaching Phil Jackson. How do you feel about that?
DOC RIVERS: I don't think it's true. I mean, Phil to me is the best coach, at least of my generation, to coach, him and Pat Riley and Gregg Popovich are the three best. I'm not in that class and don't deserve to be in that class. I ignore it.
But last year was a tough year. It was a tough year for me as a coach. It was a tough year for our players as players, and hell, I'm thankful that Danny hung in there with me more than anything.

Q. On a different note, is there any concern, if this series does continue, about your team breaking down? We saw Perkins, Rondo obviously and even Pierce with his knee.
DOC RIVERS: Well, we're not in great physical shape, there's no doubt about that. You know, but that's what it is, and there's nothing you can do about that. I think our guys are mostly gamers. The fact that Rajon tried to go last night, again, was phenomenal. Perk, obviously the injury he had last night could be significant, and we don't know the results yet. But that's clearly not looking great right now.
Paul tweaked his ankle and his knee again, so it's amazing going through this. That's part of it. It's a lot of physical and mental things that you have to go through, and we're going through it.

Q. A question somewhat similar to what you were just asked, was there ever a point last year where you thought maybe this isn't going to work out for me in Boston?
DOC RIVERS: No, I didn't ever think about that part because that was out of my control. It really was. I didn't have control over that part. All I can do is my job. Again, when I go back on last year, the thing that I'm most proud of is that when a lot of teams have that type of turmoil and those type of losses, all you read about is usually the fights in the locker room, the whispers from -- we didn't have any of that. Our players stuck together through that horrendous year.
So when I look back on that, I thought, well, in that way we did well as a staff. And I thought our young players were getting better. I just tried to focus on that. I could see we weren't going to win a lot of games, clearly, and my goal was to make each young player better, and those guys are with me all the time. I talk to them still. None of them are here. They're all gone, but they've all been to our games. I think you've seen them at the playoff games, they've all been there, and that's pretty cool.

Q. You mentioned Pop, and you said how good a coach was Pop before he got Tim Duncan, and you said don't judge me until I get the tools. Is it fair to judge you now?
DOC RIVERS: I don't care to be judged, honestly. This is a players' game. It always will be, and it really should be. They did not invent this game for us to be talking about coaches, and I believe that. I truly believe that. But it is, it's a players' game, and our job is to get the players to play. That's our job.

Q. From someone who never got a chance to win a championship as a player, I wonder if you could put into perspective the unique opportunity Paul has here to win a championship in his hometown.
DOC RIVERS: Well, you know, as a player, I had one shot and I was injured. With the Knicks, I was sitting on the bench, and I watched us lose Games 6 and 7 in street clothes. That was very difficult. We lost to the Bulls -- thank you, Will Perdue, when we were up 2-0 against them and they came back and won the Eastern Conference Finals against us. So to be able to do it against a hometeam, where you grew up, would be sensational.
I had that opportunity in some ways because I thought we were going to knock off Chicago, but we didn't. So I'm sure Paul feels that way.
But really, I'm hoping that Paul is not even thinking about any of that. We've got to just focus on the process of basketball, and once we do that, then everything else will take care of itself.

Q. Just curious, could you go through your relationship with Paul since you've been in Boston, and especially over the last year and how his leadership role has kind of changed over that time?
DOC RIVERS: Well, obviously when we first started it wasn't great because I asked him to change his game. You ask an All-Star to change your game, it's probably not the smartest thing for a coach to do. But I thought it was the right thing for the team, and I thought it was the right thing for Paul. And he didn't at the time, but he did early -- even in that year he did, and the credit goes to Paul for doing it. I mean, that's a hell of a chance to take. You're an All-Star and I'm telling you you have to change your game in some ways, and he did that, as far as just the ball movement part of it and where he was getting his shots from.
Since then he's been very good. He's been frustrated at times over the last two years, not towards the coach, just towards the losses. You know, we've had a lot of private conversations over that, just hanging in there. But like I said before the series or one of these series -- they all blend together -- I don't think Paul got enough due for re-upping with us when he clearly could have waited and been a free agent. He whispered it at times, but for the most part he wanted to stay here and be a Celtic and not leave and see this through.
We're in a generation now that whenever your team is bad, the players want to leave. They want to jump ship. They want to go somewhere else. I think Paul never did that. He wanted to stay.
Will, you can ask the last question.

Q. Thanks, Doc. By the way, Michael did yell at me and so did you. Everyone is talking about the players, and I remember when we were in San Antonio you used to give me a hard time about that Knicks series and about how we stole a championship from you. Considering how close you were as a player, and you and I had this discussion, a two-part question: You say it's a players' league, so what's more difficult, coaching the Orlando Magic to .500 and getting to the playoffs, or coaching the Boston Celtics with the expectations of getting to where you are now and winning a championship?
DOC RIVERS: Well, it's a good question. I would say this is more difficult because there's better players that you have to get to buy in. That Orlando team was just a bunch of guys who wanted to make it in the league, and you could basically turn them up and let them go and they'd run through a wall for you.
The problem with that team was with two minutes left in the game, you didn't have a lot of options. The great part of this team is you have a lot of options. You've been in the league, and most of you guys have been in this league long enough to know that unless the players decide they want to win together, you can have all the talent in the world and you're not winning in this league, you're just not. And guys have to sacrifice.
Someone asked about Ray. To me he stands out as much as anybody. Obviously Kevin and Paul and everybody, but Ray had to do it, and he did it.

Q. Considering what you've been through, though, how does this validate you now as a coach?
DOC RIVERS: I don't know. I don't care, honestly. I love coaching. I honestly love coaching. I love what I do as a profession. It's very difficult family-wise because even if you're with them, you're not. Even when you're there, you're not. It consumes you 24 hours. That's actually what I like about it.
You know, I just enjoy what I'm doing, and I'll leave it at that.

End of FastScripts

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