circles_eternal
03-31-2005, 03:32 PM
No Time to Lose Focus
The Playoffs are near, but we have a season to finish
When it comes to the end of the regular season, you have to take care of the business at hand. When you start trying to plan two or three weeks ahead of time, that's when things go south. There's no way you can do that. You still have to respect every team you play in this league, whoever it is, even though there record may not show a decent team.
On the court, they're still NBA players, and you have to respect that. That's the worst thing you can do for yourself is something like that, because you take away the respect of the other team, and that's how upsets happen.
Fans don't come here saying, 'Ahh, this is an easy one, ahh, this is a gimme. If you lose in an upset, the fans' thought process is, 'Weren't you guys prepared for that team?'
You have to keep reiterating the preparation in practice. I remember when I was with Pat Riley in Miami. We were playing Golden State. They weren't very good at the time. The day before the practice, he was drilling us hard as if we were playing the Knicks. I remember someone saying, 'Man, we just playing Golden State.'
I thought about that. I was like, 'He missed Riley's lesson at hand.'
His lesson at hand was, 'I'm not going to allow you guys to come down a level because we're playing a team that on paper may not be as good as us.'
'So I'm going to keep raising the bar so that you will be much more prepared for this team come tomorrow night. You may moan and complain right now, but come game time tomorrow, you'll be inspired to play basketball the way we're capable of playing.'
And we did.
As for the playoffs, some people ask us: 'Does playoff seeding matter?'
You want to say 'yes' because of home court advantage, but the flip side to that is you understand you want to have a big time focus going into other arenas away from home. So, you wish you have home court advantage, but if it doesn't happen, it is not the end of the world.
You still understand, 'Hey, we got to go win on the road.' Maybe if we start out on the road there is a bigger focus on our behalf, and understanding that we have to do this or we have to do that accordingly in order to try to gain some type of momentum or ground over another team that we're playing.
As far as our chances, I love this team. Sometimes people think that having the best players on paper will bring yourself a championship. Well Portland found that out the hard way that that's necessarily true. One year, they had Steve Smith, Brian Grant, Pip, Sheed Wallace, Stoudamire, Greg Anthony. They had a deep team. But it didn't bring them any championships.
Sometimes when you have guys come in that have been a go-to guy prior to that team, it's hard for them to say, 'OK, I got to do this' or 'I have to take this role here.'
We have a lot of good guys on the Spurs. I've been on bad teams before and I've been on teams that won even though we didn't have good guys. The atmosphere is the atmosphere of 'Hey, I want to come get better every day at practice. I wonder what we're going to do today because I'm sure we can learn to get better with one another.'
Whereas sometimes you have those guys that are good on the court, and on the court only. They don't know how to communicate to other guys. It's like night and day when you are dealing with those kinds of people.
Posted by Bruce Bowen - Mar 31 2005 2:04PM
source: http://www.nba.com/blog/blog31.html
The Playoffs are near, but we have a season to finish
When it comes to the end of the regular season, you have to take care of the business at hand. When you start trying to plan two or three weeks ahead of time, that's when things go south. There's no way you can do that. You still have to respect every team you play in this league, whoever it is, even though there record may not show a decent team.
On the court, they're still NBA players, and you have to respect that. That's the worst thing you can do for yourself is something like that, because you take away the respect of the other team, and that's how upsets happen.
Fans don't come here saying, 'Ahh, this is an easy one, ahh, this is a gimme. If you lose in an upset, the fans' thought process is, 'Weren't you guys prepared for that team?'
You have to keep reiterating the preparation in practice. I remember when I was with Pat Riley in Miami. We were playing Golden State. They weren't very good at the time. The day before the practice, he was drilling us hard as if we were playing the Knicks. I remember someone saying, 'Man, we just playing Golden State.'
I thought about that. I was like, 'He missed Riley's lesson at hand.'
His lesson at hand was, 'I'm not going to allow you guys to come down a level because we're playing a team that on paper may not be as good as us.'
'So I'm going to keep raising the bar so that you will be much more prepared for this team come tomorrow night. You may moan and complain right now, but come game time tomorrow, you'll be inspired to play basketball the way we're capable of playing.'
And we did.
As for the playoffs, some people ask us: 'Does playoff seeding matter?'
You want to say 'yes' because of home court advantage, but the flip side to that is you understand you want to have a big time focus going into other arenas away from home. So, you wish you have home court advantage, but if it doesn't happen, it is not the end of the world.
You still understand, 'Hey, we got to go win on the road.' Maybe if we start out on the road there is a bigger focus on our behalf, and understanding that we have to do this or we have to do that accordingly in order to try to gain some type of momentum or ground over another team that we're playing.
As far as our chances, I love this team. Sometimes people think that having the best players on paper will bring yourself a championship. Well Portland found that out the hard way that that's necessarily true. One year, they had Steve Smith, Brian Grant, Pip, Sheed Wallace, Stoudamire, Greg Anthony. They had a deep team. But it didn't bring them any championships.
Sometimes when you have guys come in that have been a go-to guy prior to that team, it's hard for them to say, 'OK, I got to do this' or 'I have to take this role here.'
We have a lot of good guys on the Spurs. I've been on bad teams before and I've been on teams that won even though we didn't have good guys. The atmosphere is the atmosphere of 'Hey, I want to come get better every day at practice. I wonder what we're going to do today because I'm sure we can learn to get better with one another.'
Whereas sometimes you have those guys that are good on the court, and on the court only. They don't know how to communicate to other guys. It's like night and day when you are dealing with those kinds of people.
Posted by Bruce Bowen - Mar 31 2005 2:04PM
source: http://www.nba.com/blog/blog31.html