Rowan Kavner
PLAYA VISTA, Calif. – Head coach Doc Rivers isn’t typically one for pep talks throughout the season.
He doesn’t believe in those types of speeches unless they’re absolutely necessary. After Game 7 finished, with the season over and few players saying much, he felt it was the time to empathize with his group.
“I told them I was a player for 13 years, and I had my heart broken for 13 straight years,” Rivers said. “I told them, every night I prayed, every single night, my only goal was to win a world championship.”
That never panned out for Rivers as a player.
Eventually, he’d win a championship in his ninth season as a head coach in 2008, but he never got to experience that satisfaction during his playing career. As he spoke to his team after the Game 7 loss in Houston, it made more sense to draw on that time in his life.
Rivers made three straight trips to the Eastern Conference semifinals while playing for Atlanta. He got closer to a championship than the Clippers ever had losing in the Eastern Conference with the Knicks. Two years later, he went to the Western Conference Finals with the Spurs, and again his road ended there.
“Every year, I’d give my heart completely to the team, and every year, it got completely broken,” Rivers said to his team. “I told them it was worth it. I told them it’s so worth it to buy in and give yourself to a team.”
The Clippers felt they had the pieces to make a championship run, further leading to the feeling of shock enveloping the locker room in Houston after the Game 7 loss, falling one game short of the team’s first trip to the Western Conference Finals in franchise history.
Rivers said there can only be one happy team when the playoffs end, and that’s what makes sports so difficult.
“That’s what I always try to explain to the players,” he said. “When you lose, you lose, and you’re not going to be happy about it, especially if you think you can win. I thought this team believed that. It was a lot of long faces.”
Speaking to that group of long faces, he let them know that sometimes, the situation they found themselves in is just the sad reality of sports. But he also said that’s what should make players keep pushing themselves.
“It’s worth giving yourself to the team,” Rivers repeated. “It’s worth getting your heart broken and taking all the criticism. It should excite you – it does to me. I told them that.”
In addition to sharing his own message, Rivers said he asked owner Steve Ballmer to talk to the team.
“It’s Steve’s first year – hell of a year he’s had, when you think about it,” Rivers said. “He had a lot of good things, and he had this.”
Rivers said that’s as much of a “welcome to the NBA” moment as an owner can expect. It was a crushing moment for the Clippers, and Rivers said he was “broken up” after the game.
But his focus quickly shifted to the 2015-16 season. As he said, “you just have to get back on.”
Despite what happened in Houston, Rivers said he saw growth in the team knocking out the defending champions. He said one could make the case there was growth in going one game further than the Clippers did last year, though he knows going a series further is what would have been key.
Still, a trip to the Western Conference Finals isn’t what Rivers is striving for.
“Our goal is to be a champion,” Rivers said. “We’re clearly not that yet, and we have to keep working for that.”