(On the Game): “It was one of those games where I thought our guys played really hard. We had some mistakes towards the end that I think cost us the game. It’s tough, it’s tough to take the loss because I thought our guys played hard enough to get the win. We have to keep playing hard and applying all the things we talked about on both ends of the floor. We have to know that it’s going to work out for us, we’re going to have a breakout game. Right now we’re losing some of these battles, in the long run hopefully we’ll win the war.”
(On his final shot): “I had the range. When I let it go, I thought it was good. I really thought it was good. It caught a little bit of the back rim.”
(On today’s game): “It hurts. It hurts a lot, because we tied it. We played the right type of basketball. We put ourselves in the position to win and we didn’t finish it.”
(On the team’s growing pains): “It’s tough but we can take a lot of good from tonight. We made some pretty big shots. Joey Graham played a great game, Daniel Gibson played a great game, and Antawn Jamison played a great game. We had a lot of guys come out tonight and step up. We put ourselves out in a position to win, which we haven’t done for a while. We have to continue, work hard, and I think we’ll get that chemistry together.”
NETS HEAD COACH AVERY JOHNSON
(On The Game): “For us, especially being in the bounce-back mode of how we concluded the last game, it was good for our guys. And also, to close in on a play that we worked on all morning and it carried over into the game and Brook finished it.”
“[Concerning] our defense, we were struggling a little bit with Jameson’s pick and rolls, but we finally got that solved and fortunately they missed that last shot.”
“They responded really well. Brook gave them a big speech at halftime, and he was really vocal and upset, and it carried over into the second half.”
(On What Was Different in the 4th Qtr): “Just moving the ball. When Devin got trapped he got rid of it, and we were playing 4 on 3. And our big guys made good decisions with the basketball, Humphries gave us great energy.”
(On Harris’ Final Charge at 9:01 Left in the 4th Qtr): “It started us on a big run. Devin’s been phenomenal at taking charges for us all year and it gave us a big spark, his drive gave us some spark.”
(On Brook Lopez): “He’s been on a tear. We just want to keep him focused. The guys also are doing a better job with spacing the floor, because now you don’t see two or three guys on Brook, because we have Morrow back and Vujacic is out there that’s a shooter, Jordan’s a shooter, Outlaw [is also a shooter]. So now, Brook has more room to operate, and he’s also trusting his teammates that if he gets double-teamed, he can find those guys, and those guys are knocking out 3’s.”
(On Lopez’s Winning Shot): “Man, I was praying, holding my breath. I really wanted this one for our guys. Especially to execute something that we had been working on all morning, and we come to the game tonight and we actually needed it, and we went over it in a timeout and they executed it perfectly. Sasha made an on-time, on-target pass to Brook, and Brook finished the shot, so I’m happy for our guys.”
(On This Finish Happening in the Dallas Game as Well): “This was the way, but again, for us being 3 and 1 on this home stand, I don’t care who our opponent is, having an opportunity, an opportunity, to go 4 and 1, that’s a pretty good position for our ball club to be in, especially in the second half of the season.”
(On 13th Win of the Season): “We hadn’t even talked about it. Nobody brought it up in the locker room. Like we said, we’re trying to start our own history here, and hopefully we’ll be able to look back on this year as the year that catapulted Nets basketball back into prominence.”
(On Derrick Favors): “He wasn’t focused the end of the third quarter, made two critical mistakes on one possession, so we had to get Humphries in there, let Derrick figure a few things out, then when we got him back in he was okay.”
BROOK LOPEZ
(If final play was the same one they tried against Dallas): “Actually no, it was a different one. We ran that play a lot tonight, the play from the Dallas game, but we just wanted to execute at the end of the half. We didn’t do that in the first half and coach gave us a piece of his mind so we wanted to fix that.”
(On their energy-level): “Our energy wasn’t great the first half at all. We came out strong in the second half, tapered off a little bit but we came up strong when we needed to.”
(Last time he had a game-winner): “I don’t know, it might have been Stanford but it feels good. We ran the play exactly the way we wanted to.”
DEVIN HARRIS
(On the game winner): “We fought hard all game long to get to that position and Brook did a great job of getting us a bucket, Anthony did us a great job of getting us a key bucket late.”
(On taking so long to match their intensity): “Half of it was what they were doing, half of it was us not getting back on defense and really trying to cut off the easy baskets. I thought we did a better job of that in the second half and offensively we took better shots so we were able to match up and get back with a little more vision.”
(On finishing the game): “It’s a learning process for us. It’s something that we struggled with the first half of the season and hopefully we can pick it up and learn from this one and continue to do this at a high rate for the second part of the season.”