OKLAHOMA CITY â€" Over the course of am 11-day, six-game series, Oklahoma City Thunder coach Scott Brooks refused to put himself in the same class as his opponent, the San Antonio Spurs' Gregg Popovich.
Brendan Maloney, US PRESSWIRE
The secret weapon behind the Oklahoma City Thunder? Coach Scott Brooks.
Brendan Maloney, US PRESSWIRE
The secret weapon behind the Oklahoma City Thunder? Coach Scott Brooks.
Brooks, 46, said the Thunder were appropriately nervous to play the four-time champions. He made fun of his own beginnings as a 5-11 NBA role player, saying, "I'm not a good leader."
He deflected big-picture assessments for the duration of the Western Conference finals, concentrating on leading a a team of mostly 20-somethings to an NBA Finals berth. That tenor shifted with Wednesday night's 107-99 Game 6 victory against the Spurs, as Brooks took a moment to reflect.
"You have to go through a lot of good teams," Brooks said. "And we went through some very, very incredible organizations, Lakers, Dallas, San Antonio. And then in order to win a championship, we're going to have to go through Miami or Boston.
"But we have to do it one game at a time. We've got four more wins to go."
Before the Thunder snapped San Antonio's 20-game winning streak with a four-victory run of their own, becoming the 15th team to rally from 2-0 down to win a best-of-seven series, Brooks found ways to have fun.
Asked how the 1994 Houston Rockets, for whom he played, came back from down 2-0 to beat the Phoenix Suns, Brooks joked, "I can assure you it wasn't Kenny Smith."
Smith was the team's starting point guard, now an analyst for TNT, which covered the series and featured Brooks' comments during their cablecasts.
The levity was part of Brooks' plan to treat every day, every practice, every game as if it were the regular season, as he did before the series-clinching Game 6. He described the shootaround before the game as "any other a month ago." He said there would be no planned addresses from veteran players before the game; just another day's work.
"It will be the same," Brooks said. "I will go over some adjustments. Nothing changes on that end. I usually give guys the opportunity to speak up but that usually doesn't happen until after the game â€" when they're mad at me."
Yet Brooks showed flexibility in key moments. When star forward Kevin Durant said he could play wire-to-wire in Game 6, Brooks obliged, to the 23-year-old's surprise.
"After we started the first quarter I went to the bench and told the coach I can go all night, I can go 48 (minutes)," Durant said. "I didn't think they would let me do it, but they kept me in, and I was just trying to get my team a spark. Coach is always getting in my ear about inspiring my team by my play."
Although Thunder general manager Sam Presti gets credit for building a winner in Oklahoma City, it's the coach who took over for the fired P.J. Carlesimo in 2008 who has Popovich's attention.
"They're disciplined. They're unselfish. They have a great work ethic. They're well prepared. He and his staff have done a great job," Popovich said of Brooks.
Brooks derives lessons from his NBA playing days of 1988-98. He started just seven games in 10 seasons with seven teams but saw how a championship team operated in 1994 with the Rockets, under coach Rudy Tomjanovich.
"When you're a kid you always think about winning a championship, and I was never a star player, so I never had dreams of making the last shot," Brooks said.
"I had dreams of being on a team. And now I get to coach a team that believes in each other, that continues to impress me by the way they work, by the way they care for one another."
That's the message Brooks delivered with his team down 15 at halftime of Game 6. Not the X's and O's he pushed in practice, or their failures of the first half.
"We talked about a few things that were very important," Brook said. "It had nothing to do with the stats.
"It had everything to do with who we are as men, who we are as a team, the type of spirit that we want to show every time down the court, and it was all about that, about body language, about being a family."
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