On if the Hornets are a championship caliber team: “They haven’t been through a lot of playoffs together. This is the start for them.  I think they have just as good a chance as anybody. They were a No. 2 seed for a reason. When you win 56 or 57 games in this Western Conference this year….that’s kind of like winning 64. They did a terrific job. When you’ve got a point guard like this, (Chris Paul) the sky is the limit. When you’ve got really good point guard play, when you’ve got good center play with (Tyson) Chandler getting double-doubles and (David) West is another go-to guy, you can do some damage against anybody.”

On congratulating the Hornets: “We want to congratulate Byron (Scott), his team, the whole Hornets organization, and the city of New Orleans. They put on a great show this series. Byron, congratulations to him again on getting NBA Coach of the Year. It is well deserved. Congratulations to a young Nate Archibald (in Chris Paul). He is a special player, Chris Paul. He is relentless. He is strong. He is intelligent. He has a bright future. He and his coach have great chemistry. He seems like he is very coachable. He pretty much dominated us this series.”

“They took it to us. They came on our home floor and won game 4. We just didn’t have enough of our men playing well at the same time.”

On the loss: “I just feel bad for our men that the season is over for them. We’ve been just really inconsistent this year. We haven’t been able, in the second half of the season, to keep up with the better teams. We paid the price for it.”

On playing in his hometown city of New Orleans: “This is tough for me. Obviously, this is where I was born and raised. That put aside, we were here trying to do a job for our team and the men that we work for. Again, it’s over now and they are moving on.  They deserve to be moving on. They (Hornets) played their hearts out. Our men (Dallas) who we had in there in the fourth quarter, especially in the last eight minutes of the game, they poured it out for us. You look at the guys who were out there…they poured it out for us. They laid it out on the line and needed one rebound when we were down by three. One long rebound and maybe we could have cut it, got that rebound, and went down and got a three point basket to tie it up.”

Mavericks Guard-Forward Jerry Stackhouse

On the game: “You just have to take your hat off to New Orleans. They came in and did some things better than we did.  It wasn’t so much game planning or anything like that; it’s just in between the lines they played better. They made more shots, they made more plays [and] we faltered. We tried to get this game, but we left it out there. Like I said, they made more plays than we did. . . You gotta tip your hat to the New Orleans Hornets. It’s the feel-good story of the NBA.”

Mavericks Forward Brandon Bass

On the game: “I wanted to win. We wanted to win. But I wish the Hornets the best. I’ve still got a lot of friends over there. They’re pretty good. I thought we could win it every night, but every night they kind of got the edge on us. Chris Paul and all the supporting cast, they made plays.”

Mavericks Forward Dirk Nowitzki

On the game and where to go from here: “Right now I think we’re all disappointed. I think we’re little better than what we showed in these games. You don’t want to say stuff when you’re emotional and disappointed. We’ll let this one just sit for a while and then obviously, once you don’t win it all, once you don’t win the championship, you’ve always got to look at what you have to do to make the franchise better. We didn’t play well enough to win this series. I don’t want to take anything away from New Orleans.  I think they’re a phenomenal team. They showed it throughout the whole regular season with the Coach of the year and probably the MVP or one of the top three MVP’s of this league. They’ve got what you need to be a good team.”