When you’re the head coach in the final minutes of a championship game, you have to try to keep the team under control. You can’t get caught up in the emotions of the game because when you get that close to something as important as a championship, the emotions can take over, and that can be the worst thing that happens. You can’t get too hyper, whether you’re the coach or a player.

What can happen is that, if you’re ahead, you can celebrate in your mind too early. Many times, I’ve seen celebrations come early, and then you end up paying for it later. What you have to do is concentrate on what is at hand and execute, really try to stick to a game plan on both ends of the floor.

You can’t try to do everything at once. You have to take things one at a time or you’ll get confused. You try to oversimplify things and narrow them down to what is important at each particular moment. This is where the concentration comes in. You have to concentrate in a certain area and not allow yourself to mentally wander into other areas.

It’s like the proverbial one-game-at-a-time, one-pitch-at-a-time, one-possession-at-a- time. If the other team has the ball, you have to get the ball, period. That’s your focus at that moment. It’s basically something that you have to really, really concentrate on, otherwise you’ll be all over the lot, so to speak.

Yeah, it's an emotional game, but you have to think beyond the emotion and you try to let the emotions be in the hands of others. You know, fans are emotional, sometimes coaches can get emotional, or a player may get emotional, but you just can't afford to get that emotional with things. If you do, you're going to have problems.

Al Attles is a vice president for the Golden State Warriors. Al coached the Warriors to their only NBA title in 1975. Al is one of the celebrity chairs for the 1998 PASS Benefit.