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Doc Rivers pulled no punches in his postgame press conference last night following the Clippers’ 95-87 loss at the hand of the Detroit Pistons. It sounds like his comments to the press were reflective of his talk to the team in the locker room as well. Check out what he had to say below, courtesy of Clippers PR:
RE: Losing focus after getting the lead
“I thought we stalled before halftime. We have been great and you have up and downs, but I don’t think we had the right spirit tonight. I didn’t think we played together. As a team we have been great, but today was a step backwards. We played the blame game, pointed fingers at each other, which is something we have not done at all. I have seen winning, and that is not winning. To me, every once in a while, the basketball gods take over and we deserved to lose. WE tried to rally, it’s easy to do that when you get down, but we lost the lead because our heads weren’t right tonight. I don’t know what the reason was, and we’re going to be a really good basketball team, but we are never going to be a good team if we play and act like that. We deserved to lose, I hate losing, but I was fine with losing tonight.”
RE: Avoiding a slump
“Either it’s a good lesson or not, that’s up to them. It was early and once it comes, it’s tough to turn and get it out. When it does happen, you need everybody to rally and get everybody out of it. It happens in a lot of different ways, two guys could get into an argument, it doesn’t matter. It can happen a lot of ways. I told them at halftime, my eye test is this is not the team that we have played like in the first four games, and if we go back out there like that, we are going to get our butt kicked.”
RE: If the team was due for a bad performance
“No, we may be due for not playing well and not executing well, but not acting right, you’re not due for that. To me that’s inexcusable. If we want to be a good team we have to won up to it, and that’s exactly what they heard after the game.”
RE: If playing the Warriors motivates the players
“It should. They have owned us, and the league for that matter, and we have to be ready. It’s going to be a tough game, but we are playing well. We took a step back tonight in the second half, and the last three or four minutes. In the last three or four minutes of the first half we actually extended the lead, got it to ten, and we were unhappy.”
Blake Griffin disagreed with Doc’s assessment, noting his his postgame comments:
“I thought we missed shots. I thought we made small, stupid mistakes here and there just as a team, but I didn’t see anyone pointing fingers. But, that’s a perspective thing so maybe [Coach Doc Rivers] saw it from his perspective.”
What do you think? Was it just a matter of poor execution and missed shots, or did some attitude problems arise last night in the Clippers’ first loss?