The expectation question is a little bit overdone. I think I've got it figured out. If the expectations for your team are high, and you don't measure up, you get fired. If the expectations are low and you lose, you get fired. |
The hard part is, from the outside, the expectation is that it is going to be very easy, you're just going to roll out there with your talent, ... That can lead to a lot of angst when things don't go well. There's a lot more to being a team than talent. I used the analogy of the Olympics with them. We have a lot of good individual players, but that is not going to be enough. |
The key on any team, ... is to be good defensively, everybody's got to defend. |
The people out there with the 'too many stars, not enough basketballs, too many egos,' that's wrong, |
There were a lot of good things tonight. More than anything I really liked our energy and our intensity. |
There's no question in my mind that they have the best understanding of what their game is. |
They are going to have to beat out those veteran guys. It is not going to be easy. At every spot there are good veteran people ahead of them. |
They do a great job at the basket. They're a team that doesn't give up points in the paint, and it's tough to get anything to the rim, and we didn't have a lot of guys making (outside) shots. |
They wanted to win a lot more than we did. They had a lot more resolve to try to get the job done down the stretch and we were hoping we would win, we were hoping some shots went in but we didn't dig down and make any possession tough on them at the end. |
They're our two best players, |
This is hopefully rock bottom. Everybody's trying to go one-on-one. |
Those are the two biggest things, run and make open shots. |
To be doing all of this with what he's gone through physically, I'll never get over it. It's phenomenal. |
To be quite honest, it will cause the least controversy right now, because that's sort of the consensus of who you guys thought was going to start. So no big surprise in the headlines in the paper. |
Tony Parker, if you've been watching this year, has just been picking people apart on the pick-and-rolls. We made it a major emphasis and made a decent effort. ... It was tough to contain him tonight. |