"There are always going to be jitters," Harrison Barnes said Wednesday at Oracle Arena's availability. "No matter how relaxed you try to be. The biggest thing is to use it in a positive way, not getting too hard on yourself. Game 1 there are going to be adjustments, we have to be able to adapt. We don't know defensively, how they're going to guard Steph, all that stuff. So we just have to be ready to turn that energy into a good thing."
The Warriors do not feature a player with NBA Finals experience, and have gotten off to slow starts at home consistently. They trailed after the first quarter in two of the three games vs. Houston and have a home first-quarter point-differential of just plus-0.3.
Barnes said Kerr's message to the team was to enjoy the moment, and not treat it as just another game, a surprising difference from what you typically hear coaches tell their players at moments like this.
"[The message has been] 'just enjoy the moment,'" Barnes said. "Obviously he's been there five times. This is a very special experience. You don't want to brush it off and say 'This is just another basketball game.' You want to really appreciate this because it's so rare in your career that you can get here, and you don't want to take any of them for granted."
Kerr on the other hand, was stressing just staying focused to the media.
"We all just have enough to worry about on our own just playing the games and focusing on our jobs. That's a big part of the Finals experience, just trying to block out everything else and just play.
"We've talked about the chaos that surrounds the game itself, and you have to be able to separate the two," Kerr said to a room full of reporters with cameras capturing his every word with the NBA Finals banner behind him, you know, like any other day. "You've got to go through the media frenzy and the other distractions that come with being in The Finals, and you still have to focus on your job.
"What I really found as a player was once you get on the floor, you just start playing and everything returns to normal. It's still just a basketball game."
Shaun Livingston wasn't as concerned, saying that he feels the Warriors are prepared for this moment.
"I don't think [we'll be nervous]. I think we're all ready," Livingston said. "We don't have any Finals experience, but we're all veterans. We all feel like we're supposed to be here. It's the Finals, but it's basketball. None of this stuff really matters now, but we played in the playoffs, in the Conference Finals, we won 67 games. Our confidence in that, we played to get here. We played good ball."
Still, the Warriors were surprisingly level headed as the media throng scurried about Wednesday. They neither sloughed off the question nor described it as a challenge. Nerves are nerves.
"There will be some nerves," Andrew Bogut admitted. "But this'll be something we'll remember our whole careers. Just the media attention, we haven't experienced this in an NBA season before. It's exciting, but we're looking forward to getting it tipped, because there are a lot of distractions and a lot of things going on between now and then."
Nerves, inexperience, the media frenzy ... they're all new things to the Warriors, but they're also just more items in a long list of things they've learned from and ultimately overcome in these playoffs. We'll see how they handle the reality of it in Game 1 Thursday night.
No comments:
Post a Comment