Andrew Bogut doesn't care if it's spectacular or a heart-stopping thriller.
When the 213cm centre from Melbourne walks off the Golden State Warriors' Oracle Arena on Tuesday after game one of the NBA's Western Conference Finals against the Houston Rockets he just wants a win.
"It doesn't matter how we do it," Bogut told reporters. "It doesn't need to be pretty.
"It can be ugly."
The game will be new territory for the Australian who entered the NBA as the No.1 draft pick a decade ago and he has never been to a conference title series before.
If regular season form is any indication, Bogut's Warriors should beat Houston in the best-of-seven game series and move on to play the Eastern Conference champions, either the Cleveland Cavaliers or Atlanta Hawks, for the NBA Championship title.
The Warriors are the hottest team in the NBA after amassing a 67-win, 15-loss regular season record and then dismantling the New Orleans Pelicans and Memphis Grizzlies in the first two rounds of the post-season.
The Rockets had no answer to the Warriors' suffocating defence led by enforcers Bogut and forward Draymond Green and the offence spearheaded by the most lethal shooting tandem in basketball, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson.
Not surprisingly, the Warriors aren't relying on their regular season form to get them through.
The Rockets are bubbling with confidence after becoming just the ninth team in NBA history to fight back from a 1-3 series deficit when they thumped the Los Angeles Clippers 113-100 in Houston on Sunday to claim the decisive game seven.
Warriors' head coach Steve Kerr, a three-time NBA champion as a player with the Chicago Bulls who picked up two more with the San Antonio Spurs, has briefed his team on what to expect from Houston, led by All-Stars James Harden and Dwight Howard.
"We saw Memphis three times and saw New Orleans four times (in the regular season), but they looked different in the playoffs," Kerr said.
"Every series presents a different challenge, but when you get to the conference finals whoever you're playing is playing with a lot of confidence, playing well."
The series could come down to the battle of the big men - Bogut and Howard.
If Bogut needed extra motivation he would just have to recall two years ago in the off-season when the 211cm Howard, an eight-time All-Star, three-time Defensive Player of the Year - and at the time the NBA's most prized free agent - met with the Warriors' management.
There was talk of Howard, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Warriors doing a deal where the Lakers would sign Howard on a five-year $US118 million deal and then trade him to the Warriors for Bogut and Thompson.
The deal didn't happen and Howard opted to go to the Rockets.
The past is the past and Bogut is looking to a future that involves beating the Rockets and then helping the Warriors to the NBA Championship - quite likely against Australian team-mate Matthew Dellavedova's Cavaliers.
"We want to make this a winning memory," Bogut said.
The Cavaliers-Hawks series begins Wednesday (Thursday).
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