On Kobe's PT:
Q. To what extent do you regret the way that decision was made last year? There was a lot made about you playing him more minutes than he thought he should play. Is that a burden for you? Do you feel some guilt?
A. I felt bad about it. I don’t know if I would say guilty. I know Kobe’s a competitor and he’s going to play as many minutes as you want him to play. I’m also a competitor, so I want to win and I know having him on the court gives me the best opportunity to win. But I also know that I’ve got to think about him more than anything. And I thought there were points in time last year where I thought he could play a certain amount of minutes. He told me Day One the minutes that he thought he could play in and like I told him at the end of the day, ‘You were absolutely right and I was wrong.’ I won’t make that mistake again.
Q. Last year there were some overtime situations. You’re going to make the decision to not play him in an overtime if you hit that ceiling?
A. We hit that ceiling I’m going to stick to it.
3 pointers and Analytics:
Q. Your detractors latched onto a few things you said last year, but particularly in preseason when you said 3-pointers didn’t win championships. And that came up before the season, then we see Golden State win a title. Would you want to clarify that statement or revise it now?
A. No. Everybody wants to take, ‘Well he said…’ Yeah, but if you are a 3-point shooting team in this league, you’re No. 1 in the league, but you’re last in defense, you won’t win a championship. They were the No.1 offensive team and defensive team in the league. They were the best team. They deserved to win the championship. The only thing I would say, or extract from that, is you can be a great 3-point shooting team, but if you don’t play defense, you won’t win championships.
Q. What would it look like if you guys tried to play that way?
A. We’re not going to play that type of style. We’re going to take 3-point shots that are given to us on a consistent basis. We’re not going to just come down and be launching 3-pointers. We have Lou who can make them, Jordan who can make them, Swaggy who can make them. Jabari (Brown). We have a number of guys – Ryan (Kelly) – who can make them on a consistent basis, but it’s not going to be the focal point of our offense.
Q. To what degree have you had to compromise on those issues? Analytics is becoming a bigger part of the organization.
A. I wouldn’t say I had to compromise, it’s basically for me, it’s adding certain things to the element of us being a little more successful. The analytical part, like I said, I wasn’t a big proponent in it, but Clay (Moser) is a guy who’s kind of our go-between to make sure the analytical guys understand exactly what I want, and also to make us understand exactly what they’re doing. He’s kind of our buffer. Mark is a guy who knows it extremely well, so are we using a it a lot more this year? Absolutely.
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