OAKLAND — After winning Game 3, Kyrie Irving said comments from the Warriors about wanting to celebrate a championship in Cleveland bothered them.
“Then you add, of course, some chatter in there, and that adds some extra motivation,” Irving said. “So we see everything. I’ll be sitting up here lying saying that I didn’t see it.”
The Warriors have been clear they don’t need any extra motivation to win a championship. They aren’t monitoring everything the Cavaliers players are saying during interviews.
“If you need to find motivation in something like that, then great,” Draymond Green said on Sunday. “I don’t really care.”
But one Cavalier in particular has been unafraid to speak his mind. Without hesitation, Richard Jefferson directly said all of the pressure to win Game 5 is on the Warriors come Monday.
“They’re damn right it is,” Jefferson began his rant. “It’s not on us. Where is the pressure on us? They had a 73 win team and they added a former MVP. We added Kyle Korver and Deron Williams, they added an MVP to a 73 win team after being up 3-1. And then KD was up 3-1. The pressure is all on them. We believe we’re the defending champs. We believe we have enough here to win a championship. We haven’t played great thus far but there’s no pressure on us. There never has, there’s never been that.It’s been about them proving last year was a fluke, KD validating the move here. Which has been validated, but no, we feel very comfortable.”
Jefferson played a team-high 22 minutes off the bench in Game 3 and played a role in defending Durant. The 36-year-old is averaging 6.3 points per game thus far in the NBA Finals.
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