On the game overall: “I have to look at the tape, it just seemed to me that we just couldn’t hit a shot. I thought we did a pretty good job in terms of executing. We put Brooklyn on the line too much. That’s was a big problem tonight, we were out of position at times. Any time you allow a team to get up to the line almost 40 times it’s going to be hard to win the game. I give our guys a lot of credit for fighting and hanging in there and having a chance to tie it up and go into overtime. ”
On CJ Miles big game: “He had it going. He came out early and made shots and that was a great sign because he kept it going in the 2nd half as well. We started to really look for him in the 2nd half and he did a good job of coming off of screens. Brooklyn did a good job of trying to jump him coming off of those screens which left some other guys open which we were able to take advantage of.”
His thoughts on his hot 3-point shooting: “The game slows down and the basket seems as big as the arena. I tried to make sure I got good looks at the basket to set up a good shot. I did not want to rush and take wild shots. I just made sure I stayed into what we were doing as a team. My teammates looked for me and screened for me. I couldn’t have done it without them.”
On the game itself: “We are playing hard. It is just growing pains with just learning how to play. The first quarter did not really help the cause. We got off to a very slow start. We have a better chance at winning a game when we are not playing from behind, making us have to make these spectacular plays just to have a chance to win the game.”
Nets Head P.J. Carlesimo
On how the team closed the game out: “I though our guys played hard and played a lot of good minutes; we allowed the game to get that close. They’re a very difficult team to defend with the iso’s. C.J. (Miles) was obviously in a different zone and we didn’t make good enough adjustments to try to slow him down. I wouldn’t say we were lucky, but I would say we deserved to win more than Cleveland did. We put our selves in position, if that shot goes down, we’d still be out there playing. We made mistakes, we didn’t make a ton of them but we made little mistakes. They outscored us by two in the second, three in the third, and two in the fourth. We were scoring a little bit and we were defending a little bit but not enough. We had a good lead and we let it get away. We the coaches need to figure out our rotations better.”
On San Antonio and OKC coming up: “The Spurs still aren’t missing a beat since the beginning of the year. Manu looked tired in the beginning of the year, maybe because of the Olympics and the whole ordeal. Now he’s back to full strength. Timmy is Timmy I don’t know what people want Timmy to do; he changed every game that he’s in. Tony (Parker) is one of the best point guards in the league and they are one of the best-coached teams in the league. They’re also very good in that building, so its going to be a challenge no question. Oklahoma is a different animal; you got two guys playing out of their mind Kevin (Durant) and Russell (Westbrook). Their other players are good too, they both score a ton of points. The Spurs are a little different than they used to be. They score a bunch of points and shoot a bunch of three point shots. Controlling the tempo is going to be more of a challenge for us and more of a priority than it sometimes is.”
On the game: “Brook was a monster and he definitely carried us in that fourth quarter. I don’t think it was the fourth quarter that cost us, it was the second quarter where we really got hurt. We came out pretty well and built a lead. It’s one of those things that we have to fix, and we talked about it a lot. There were a lot of good things that came from this game and the way we played. We got to fix a few things defensively that we have to clean up and get better.”
On Brook Lopez’ performance: “Yeah, I think he’s getting his confidence back. I mean, we started playing bad when he went out, so now you’re starting to see him getting back to where he was before the injury. We definitely had to get him the ball and keep feeding him tonight because we felt we the advantage”.
On getting his comfort level back and on the game: “Yeah, I just want to keep improving. I was just trying to be aggressive, defensively and offensively rebounding as well. We ran our sets correctly, I tried to push deep and we got good looks. We felt we came out a little flat tonight. We want to try to come out with more energy and come off this day off tomorrow with energy, especially. I think we’ve been playing with more energy, that’s the bottom line. Coming out, we needed to pick it up a little bit as we went, but we stuck in there, especially when they made their runs. Tonight, we were a little disappointed that we didn’t close them out. We let them back in it a few times, we really wanted to shut them down tonight, but we want to continue to play the way we’ve been playing.”
On the coaching change: “I don’t know much about the coaching change or anything like that, but as a team, we really tried to unite and really regain our focus, come together as one and play for each other.”