WARRIORS PRACTICE FACILITY, OAKLAND, CA — I’ll pickup from just before where we left off last, Moda Center in Portland, through to yesterday’s practice. Well, actually, we left off talking to Draymond Green, who was one of the last players out of the locker room after a game-saving steal.
NOTE: Head coach Steve Kerr gave the Golden State Warriors the day off on Monday after a thrilling 95-90 victory against the Portland Trail Blazers on Sunday.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2014
Aside from the extra media around for the scrum — national writers Sam Amick and J.A. Adande, for example — the first thing I noticed upon entering practice was that David Lee was shooting around on the far court and in a white jersey, which is usually an indication of being on the second unit, i.e., that he would come off the bench.
He was announced as “questionable” for the game, but clarified his status to Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle:
The Warriors handed out an official injury report before they opened the doors to the practice facility Tuesday, so reporters dutifully tweeted out the news that David Lee was a limited participant in the workout and had been labeled as questionable for Wednesday’s game.
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Once inside the doors, however, the Warriors’ consistently affable starting power forward had a different story and yelled, “Get your stories right. I participated in all five scrimmages.”
Kerr was first up with media and said that the team, coming back from the day off, did not practice well. “It’s been that way on every team I’ve been on”, Kerr said.
In stark contrast to Mark Jackson, who was often understandably over-protective of his players (more on that in a future separate editorial, I’m sure), Kerr was his usual “open book” and displayed the transparency he’s become known for, as Monte Poole of CSN Bay Area wrote:
Steve Kerr is a rookie head coach, but he’s been around the league long enough to understand the pitfalls of self-satisfaction. He made that much emphatically clear after an unsatisfying practice on Tuesday.
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“Hell yeah it’s a danger,” Kerr said of the hype. “I talked to the team about that today. Klay is Player of the Week, people are suddenly picking us to go The Finals . . . and the people who do those power rankings these days are putting us first or second or third.
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“And then we come out and have a (expletive: cow dung) practice. Read into that what you want.”
Up next was center Andrew Bogut, but his interview started while Kerr was still doing his. I decided to stay with Kerr because I wanted to ask if he felt that the process of flipping all the right switches was starting to click for him in his first tenure as a coach. More on that developing story later.
Diamond Leung had some quotes from Bogut in his report leading up to the Los Angeles Clippers on Wednesday.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2014
Reporters arrived at the closed doors of the Warriors’ practice facility on Wednesday the morning before the big game against the Clippers, to Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” song being blasted inside the gym. It was associate head coach Alvin Gentry‘s 60th birthday.
Inside, Leung clipped Stephen Curry hitting shot after shot and Gentry celebrating with a shimmy after a made trick shot.
Coaches aren’t required to do interviews during morning shootaround, as they’re already obligated to hold a pre-game press conference at the arena, so Kerr did not talk to reporters, although he did participate in a fifth round of free-throwing shooting contests against Curry. Kerr lost (again).
The polished Curry gave a rather “ho-hum” interview with regard to the night’s game against the Clippers. Perhaps more interesting were the shoes commemorating Veterans’ Day.
Andre Iguodala was up next. When asked if he pays attention to the media’s NBA power rankings, Iguodala dead-panned, “I watch a lot of basketball. I have my own power rankings.”
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2014
The afternoon at practice after the blowout of the Clippers, Green said the sticking out of his tongue during the Clippers game, jogging back on defense while next to Blake Griffin, was directed at Jermaine O’Neal. O’Neal, Green’s former Warriors teammate of last year, was sitting courtside and had given Green a snarl of approval after Green displayed the hot shooting had, hitting a couple of his four three-pointers during a stretch of the game.
Green also talked about starting at power forward in place of Lee.
Along with describing his first technical foul and announcing that Lee would not join the team for this weekend’s short road trip, Kerr started out the session by saying he’d watched the film and noticed that the 23 turnovers weren’t all as bad as he thought, although he was still unhappy about the last two minutes of the game in which the Warriors played sloppily.
KGO’s sports anchor Larry Beil was on hand and busy asking questions to the Warriors’ head coach when I suddenly felt a heavy weight sink into my right shoulder. I soon realized it was Festus Ezeli‘s left elbow. Meanwhile, his right elbow sunk into the left shoulder of Simmons.
“Are there any questions for me?” Ezeli quipped.
Beil played along. “Are you glad to be back?” he asked the six-foot-eleven-inch 255-pound center, whose sweat was beginning to drip onto my shoulder and arm, as well as Simmons’.
“It’s great to be out there with my teammates again,” Ezeli answered, keeping Simmons and me pinned by the force of his weight, “I love being out there with Steve Kerr as well. It’s just an all-around great feeling.”
Well, not so for Rusty and me, I thought to myself, while laughing at the absurdness of the moment. Oh, did I mention this was being videotaped?
“Is this going to earn you more minutes, this kind of blatant kissing up?” Beil joked.
“I’m hoping so,” Ezeli answered. Incidentally, he had been put on a 15-minute limit as of the Clippers game.
And with that, the jolly sweating giant released Simmons and me from our roles as human armrests and went off to do yoga with Shaun Livingston, Gentry, and assistant coach Luke Walton.
It felt like an eternity stuck under Ezeli’s elbow. Making matters worse was the fact it was being filmed by Warriors TV‘s Laurence Scott, who at one point even gently pushed my left shoulder away a few inches so as to get the right shot for the camera.
At that moment, feeling justified that absorbing Ezeli’s sweat was the equivalent of “paying my dues”, I broke media protocol and managed to pull off a selfie.
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