'O' just made his shots. As I told him the other day, we certainly haven't lost confidence in him or anything. I wanted to make sure that he hadn't lost confidence in himself. He assured me that he hadn't. |
(Brand) is clearly one of the top 10 players in the league, maybe the top five. I read early on that he said he is in much better shape this year and that has helped. He has shot the ball well from the perimeter. He is just having a fantastic season. |
(Friday) We could tell right from the beginning, we weren't all there. Tonight, we could tell we were all there. We got really active. We put pressure on them. We were really in tune with our game plan. |
A little bit over 4 percent. But knowing the guys like I know 'em, it would be shocking to me if they didn't believe in themselves. |
A lot can turn on this game tonight. |
A.D.'s leadership presence is definitely something we've missed. There's no doubt about that. And Griff was very important to our team. We miss that (veteran leadership). |
After it got to seven points our guys just hung in there. Our guys were fatigued after last night's game, so I'm really proud of how they all battled. |
All you need to do is watch a couple NBA games to know that's an automatic timeout. We have guys with enough experience to know that. It's inexcusable. |
Antonio Davis can't help but be a good influence on the other guys and Jerome Williams hustles all the time. He gets up and down the floor. |
Anybody that's involved in the league in depth and watches us play knows that we have more things in our offense for Ben probably than any other team in the league has for any other player. It's normally the guys who aren't playing well that are making those kinds of comments. So I don't put much stock in that. |
Anybody who watches us, even a little, could tell he's important to our team. All around, he's probably our most skilled big player as far as being able to shoot the ball, handle the ball, pass it and the other things he could do. And he's a popular teammate, so he's going to be missed. |
Anytime you get on that kind of roll in the NBA, it's not only impressive, but guys are playing with more confidence. They appear to be playing very well together. They're a well-rounded team, good defensively and offensively. Jason [Kidd] is one of the best players ever in the league. He makes the whole thing go. |
Apparently not, because I wasn't even aware of it until an hour and a half or so ago. It's not 1,200, it's 200. I know I got to 100 a lot faster than I got to 200. That much I know. |
As long as they're good shots. You have to earn the right to take that many shots, and you do that by taking good shots, making a good percentage of them, by playing good defense and staying out of foul trouble. |
At one point we had 11 field goals and eight of them were assisted. I thought our ball movement was good again, we played very unselfishly in general and we did what we had to do. We talked about trying to put them down early at least. It doesn't always work out the way you talk about it, but at least you get a nice lead and see how they react. |