Q. How did you sleep?
MARK DAIGNEAULT: I slept great. I always sleep great the night before a game.
Q. Dub was saying that today it felt different in the gym. It felt weird to know this is the last game of your season. Did you sense that in the gym this morning?
MARK DAIGNEAULT: There's a lot of excitement and anticipation around the game. You can't deny that. The guys always do a great job of being present with that and then moving into what we need to do, and that's what we have to focus on. We have to focus on playing the next possession, executing all the things that help you win a basketball game.
Q. Couple times after some losses and even after one of the wins in this series, various players would say the offense was sticky, the ball was sticky or passing numbers are not what they were in the regular season. Is that something you're concerned about? Do you address it specifically before such a big game or just hope that your process will unlock whatever you're hoping to accomplish?
MARK DAIGNEAULT: A little bit of both. We always try to address the things that are holding us back. But at the same time, we also have to trust our work and trust our habits and that sort of thing. The playoffs are inconvenient. You know, it's hard to score. You know, both teams' offensive ratings and metrics are down from the regular season and previous playoff series. Some of it is just about how you endure that as a team and can you get back on track and can you win possessions in the mud at times, because the playoff series get muddy and the possessions get muddy. We have to do that, too.
In a lot of ways in the playoffs it is more about your floor than about your ceiling because once you get into these series against a great team, that's what you fall to a lot of times. We certainly are going to try to throw our best punch but we have to be able to play through the imperfections of the game as well.
Q. There has not been a team that scored 100 in Game 7 of The Finals since '88. At that point, everybody is playing so hard and they are so tired that it's all in the mud. How has this team fared in the mud? Is there some comfort in knowing that it's what's to be expected tonight; that it is probably going to be one of those grind-out-to-the-end sort of deals?
MARK DAIGNEAULT: Yeah, we don't know how the game is going to go. We just let it play out how it does. But I think one of the strengths of our team this season and the experiences we've had is we have won games a lot of different ways. We've had a lot of wins and none of them have been the same. They are all different. We've figured out ways to solve the puzzle of a game on a lot of different nights and that's given us a lot of confidence. It keeps us present in the competition.
We're going to need that tonight. We're going to need to solve whatever the puzzle is tonight. We don't know what it's going to be. We don't know how the game is going to go but we are confident we can play the ball from wherever it lies as the game unfolds.
Q. You talked before Game 6 about not trying to guess but you want to be prepared. What's the line, like of preparation without trying to predict what kind of adjustments Indiana might make?
MARK DAIGNEAULT: A lot of it is continuous. We try to keep all of our tools sharp as we go through the season and as we go through the playoff run, so that as teams throw different things at us and they adjust different things, we are able to pivot pretty quickly. Usually we do that pretty well. That wasn't a strength of Game 6 for us.
But we do have confidence in our ability to do that, and we have confidence in the menu that we have kind of developed over the course of the season, and we don't know what we're going to need tonight, but hopefully it's sharp, whatever it is.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports