Keith Langlois has a solid round-up of all the inspirational soundbites from today's press conference:
Curry said he hoped he would "never get the chance to read one of you all say the team didn’t play hard, they pick and choose when they want to play, they play up to the level of their competition, the regular season doesn’t mean anything.
"For me as a coach, that’s a direct relationship to me. That’s a stab to me. That hurts me more than losing in the conference finals, because that’s something you directly control. And that’s one of my goals, personally, to never let that be said about a team that I coached and a team that represents this organization, because you don’t get that nowhere else in the organization. Everybody else in the organization works every day."
A few questions later, somebody wanted to know how you keep players motivated. Curry fairly pounced on that one, too.
"I don’t think you make anybody play. I think you substitute. Put somebody in there that wants to play. The way you have a motivated team, you remove the ones that are unmotivated. That’s pretty simple."
My only request is that he maintains the same philosophy from the opening tip of the regular season to the final horn of the last playoff game. Needlessly scrapping a strategy that won 59 games in the regular season for the conventional wisdom of shortening a bench in the playoffs and sticking with veterans simply because they're veterans was one of the most frustrating developments over the final two rounds of the playoffs.
Dumars also reinforced his zero-tolerance policy for "flipping the switch":
After Curry talked about his zero-tolerance policy for those less than fully committed to an honest day’s work, Dumars took a whack at it, too.
"You don’t want that said about your team at all," he said. "Michael is right. That’s not something you’re proud of when you hear that. When we wake up and we hear our team shows up when they want to or they turn a switch on and turn the switch off, that’s not a compliment. That was never a compliment to me. Mike and I are on the same page with that – we want guys to show up every single day. You don’t take days off. You don’t turn the switch off. You don’t turn the switch on. When you walk into The Palace and they turn the lights on and throw the ball up, you’re playing to win. You’re playing to win every night. That’s what I believe in and that’s what he believes in. If we got away from that a little bit, going forward that’s not going to be the case. If you don’t show up every night and play, you can’t be rewarded for that. That’s where we stand. We stand together on that issue."
Now go back to something Dumars said a week ago at the Saunders press conference: "I just want to make sure that we as a team, as an organization, are all on the same page and that wasn’t always the case, I felt, this year. It was too scattered at times. It really doesn’t matter how strong you are in this seat that I sit in. That one voice has to make sure we keep everything and everybody on that same page."