Antonio's been playing like that for the past month. He's been playing phenomenal. |
Any time you are a competitor and you're not winning, you get frustrated. The great ones all do and he's going to be one of the greatest that ever played this game. |
Any time you take a job where a team won the championship and got within five minutes of winning another, you wonder, how are they going to accept you? But they've been very open to coaching, very open to doing whatever we've asked. |
Anytime you can coach the greatest athletes in the world for a day, it's a thrill. |
Anytime you got a guy that can score 50 points in this league, you know he can score. |
Anytime you lose someone, a death in the family, it's very, very emotional. We're not in any situation to pressure him one way or the other. |
Anytime you're in a game and you have 42 buckets and 30 assists and only nine turnovers, you're distributing the ball, playing pretty well. |
As I said in the locker room, people die to get to 50 (wins). To get to 60 is really something. Every win beyond that shows that you've been able to play at a pretty high level for a long time. |
As I told them, their organization has always been very first class, |
As well as he's playing, all five guys have to be locked into him. Nobody's going to take him one-on-one and prevent him from getting wherever he wants. He's too quick and too good. All five guys have to be in a position to help. |
At first you're there, you're happy to be there. ... Then the pressure becomes more to produce as you're there. There's no question that for young players, there's great excitement and enjoyment. But they have to get used to making the constant adjustments that happen over the course of a series and how every game, the intensity level kicks up more and more. |
Because what teams, coaches, players try to do is set the tone for referees when they come in. |
Before the season, we said there were going to be two tough stretches -- being on the road so much early and this one, where we are playing 10 games in 10 different cities leading into the break. We knew it would be tough. We're just trying to grind our way through. |
Ben did as good a job as you can on Shaq when you play him one-on-one. His defensive presence gave us the ability to shut down some of their other people. |
Ben erases a lot of mistakes for us. He was unbelievable with everything he was doing. |