From today’s conference call, via Mike Trudell at Lakers.com:
Q. After a night’s sleep, do you have anything more about the foul situation when you were up by three?
STAN VAN GUNDY: No, you know what, first of all, the assumption of a night’s sleep is way off base, and the second thing is, I’ve rethought it and rethought it and rethought it, and it’s easy to say now do I wish we had fouled as opposed to giving that up? Yeah, but I still don’t think at 11 seconds to go in a game that we’re going to foul in that situation. I’ll put it this way: You always have regrets. Faced with the same situation again at 11 seconds, we still wouldn’t be telling them to foul.Q. Do you look back, you trapped Kobe so far in the backcourt, do you regret not trapping him further towards the midcourt stripe? And were your guys told to push up above the three point line there?
STAN VAN GUNDY: Well, look, we didn’t trap Kobe. What we did was we took the guy on the ball, put him on Kobe and never even let him inbound to the ball. And then Turk did a decent job of recovering back. That had nothing to do with the play because the ball went back to Ariza who was the inbounder, and then he got rid of the ball to Fisher. So had Ariza taken the ball and made a play or a shot, then I’d question that decision of denying the ball into Kobe, but I probably wouldn’t question that too much. You’re looking at 10.8 seconds, Kobe on the floor, I’m not going to question too much keeping him from getting the ball. You know, basically Jameer had one responsibility on the play, and that was to not give Derek Fisher a look at a three. It’s one of those things I’m sure Jameer wishes he had back and had played differently. I question whether we made that clear enough or could have told him to play the play a different way. But I thought we were pretty clear on that.
Q. You obviously didn’t want to foul with 11 seconds to go, but what about at midcourt when it was down to six or five?
STAN VAN GUNDY: By the time the ball went through the net, it was 4.6, so I mean, I don’t know when he shot it, but it would have had to have been around 6. Six or under would be about our time, so it would have been a tough play to make at that point anyway. I mean, he had to shoot it around the six second mark, 5.8, 5.9, so that would have been a tough play to make at that point, I think. At least by our strategy, and I think fouling earlier than that, even though it didn’t work out last night, I’m not sure I would change it. I’m not sure I’d be fouling. What’s the difference, six seconds, seven seconds, maybe you would, but you’re coming out of there at 11. That’s awful early, and especially the way we’ve been shooting free throws in the game. I think it would have been pretty tough. If you give them two, and now you come down and miss even one out of the two, now they’re coming back at you with six seconds, only needing a two and Kobe Bryant on the floor and the whole thing. That’s a difficult situation. So I just wouldn’t have fouled that early.
