Players and Coaches Quotes, Game 4

Orlando Magic Head Coach Doc Rivers:

“We played a team that was better than us, and that’s tough for me to ever realize or to say. I told the guys after the game that I don’t know if I’ve ever been prouder of a team in my life. They had a lot of stuff thrown at them. Their best player’s been hurt and their second best player didn’t play the season. They never asked why, and they never stopped fighting. I can’t ease the pain, but that team we played tonight played one hell of a game tonight and one hell of a series.”

“My goal was to get them to a seven game series and then I could watch them mature some more. Unfortunately we couldn’t do that.”

On seeing McGrady leave the game for an injury: "It was tough. Our plan was to use Darrell for a quarter and a half against Baron and then use Tracy to guard him, but we couldn’t do it. That hurt us obviously. The fact that he had to come off the floor was deflating to our team. When he was off the floor we were struggling for points and couldn’t find any. I tried to find the right combinations. It was a desperate search for me. I tried big, small, everything, traps, zones. Nothing worked tonight.”

On his team’s continued health problems: “Mike played well in the first half. He got cut and had to go out of the game. Troy got hurt, and he had to go out of the game. Tracy got hurt - he’s out of the game. It felt like our season tonight. They were just too physical for us, and that bothers me. Coach Silas didn’t give us any free lay-ups. They made us earn everything on the free throw line. I thought it was a clean series.”

On his team’s possible changes this offseason: “We have to have health, No. 1. When you look at this team, that’s the next step. Then we have to make some fringe moves to help us. I have no idea what those moves are, and who’s out there.”

Horace Grant:

On retiring: “I’m going fishing tomorrow, I’ll put it that way.”

Patrick Ewing:

On retiring: “I don’t want to think about that right now. (Any time frame on your decision?) “I’m not even worrying about it.”

Darrell Armstrong:

“They’re a bigger team. When you look at it, they got extra shots at the basket, many, many, many shots at the basket than we did. That’s tough sometimes to overcome.”

“I never thought that we’d lose two. Think about Game 1, Game 2, and Game 3, both teams had a chance to win all of them, and unfortunately they won Game 1, we won Game 2, and Game 3 went into overtime again. You look back and you had great opportunities and great chances to win this series, but unfortunately, they came up with all the big plays. Give them credit, they played their hearts out. I think they really focused in and you see why their one of the best road teams.”

Tracy McGrady:

On his guarantee: “It was a must-win situation for us. I wasn’t ready for vacation and my team wasn’t. I had to guarantee it. We failed, so what.”

“Definitely rest my back. Played in a hell of a lot of pain tonight. I could feel it tighten on me.”

“Doctor came in, did a little work on my back, I go, ‘I’ll go out, I’ll be fine.’”

On Charlotte: “That’s a good team, man. It’s a strong team, got a lot of weapons out there. I kind of figured it was going to end up like this.”

“They’ve got a guy like Baron Davis running the show, an up-and-comer.”

Monty Williams:

On T-Mac’s guarantee: “Everything he says and does, there’s something positive in that. He’s trying to get keyed up, get us keyed up, even had them stirred up in the other locker room. And I think, to his credit, not too many 22 year-olds have the heart to say some of the things he says, had he still put in 35, 7, and 5, something like that. He brought it every night, he played with a bad back. He could have sat out this year easily.”

Charlotte Hornets Head Coach Paul Silas:

“It’s remarkable that we could win 4 games in Orlando. I have to really commend my guys for winning 2 during the regular season and then to come here and win 2 games in the playoffs. We have gone through a lot of turmoil this year, but they have kept focus. When I needed them to step up, they all have. It was a total team effort.”

Commenting on Jamaal Magloire’s ejection: “I would assume that he will be playing in game 1 of round 2. It was a hard foul, but it just happened to be a blow to the head but he certainly was not trying to hurt anyone. That is just the way the playoffs are played. I would hope they would look at the foul and see that it was not that hard at all.”

Commenting on Jamal Mashburn: “He is still having his problems. He is weak and he is still having headaches and all sorts of things. We are just trying to hold the fort until he gets back. We are just going to try to make a run of this thing.”

Commenting on how the Hornets played an extremely physical game against the Magic: “We are a physical team. We are a big team. We like to use our bulk, but we are not out to hurt anybody. We want to play as physical as we can and dominate the boards. We try to use the gifts that we are given. You contrast that to the Magic, they try to get up and down and fly threes. That is to their advantage and it is certainly to our advantage to play tough.”

Baron Davis:

On whether he was best player in series: “I don’t want to get into all that even after we won. Tracy McGrady dominated even with the bad back. Imagine what he would’ve done if he was 100%. What I wanted to do was lead my team and not get into who was the best player in the series. We all know Tracy McGrady is one of the top five players in the league. I am just an up-and-coming team trying to get a little publicity.”

“When people trash talk, it can motivate both teams. We took it as motivation to say let us come out here and end this thing before we go back to Charlotte. Everybody on our team read his comments and what was said. I think it kind of fueled us in the mindset we are going to take it to them. It was a great ballgame. It was physical and I am glad we came up with the victory.”

“Coach told me to let the game come to me. I wanted to be aggressive, but I wanted to pick my spots. The first eight minutes we were knocking down shots and I was trying to get everybody involved. I wasn’t trying to force anything. I had confidence in my teammates that they were going to make shots and make plays.”

Jamaal Magliore:

“It was just a hard foul. My intention is not to hurt anybody. I haven’t had a flagrant all year. I was surprised at the call, but it’s playoff atmosphere...we are both competitors...so tempers are going to get the best of us.”

“My mindset was to do whatever it takes to help this team win. I wanted to rebound, block shots, and be active. Hopefully I can take some pressure off of our key players like B.D., and P.J.”

“B.D. has been the best player in this series. We said it from the get-go. In spite of all the talking the Magic have done, we have played ourselves to victory.”

David Wesley:

"We are looking to get Mash back by Sunday. A couple of our guys have called him and talked to him.”

“I don’t think a lot of people gave us a chance when Mash wasn’t playing. When they won a game on our floor, I felt like we might have been written off. We really played well and we have played without Mash before. There was slippage there in the second game, but we definitely got it back in the third and fourth game.”