Post Game Quotes -- Dec. 6, 2006

George Karl - Denver Nuggets Head Coach
"This loss hurts, we gave this game away. It hurts, it’s painful. Out of our six losses, we’ve probably given three of them away. Until we grow up and be more disciplined, focused, and committed and understand why we have leads and why we give them back, we are going to continue to have the same growing pains. I don’t know why it is, but we seem to play the fourth quarter a little immature. A little bit too much "I," and not "We." Tonight, I don’t know how many lay-ups we missed, probably five or seven."

On the last play
"They were zoning us, so we ran Miller up the middle and our second option was to kick it out to Melo. I think Andre made the right read. You can’t be a one dimensional team at the end of a game. You have to be able to have three or four options. My disappointment was our defensive pick-ups in the fourth quarter. We had a great defensive third quarter. Melo got in foul trouble, and we played our hearts out defensively and get the lead because of our defense. It’s not Melo, but when Melo got back in the game it became an offensive game again. We missed our shots, they zoned us. Which slowed us down a little and we missed a lot of lay-ups and a lot of free throws. My thing is just the discipline of knowing who you are and how you play on a consistent basis."

Yakhouba Diawara - Nuggets Guard/Forward
On the frustration level of the team and Coach Karl
"It’s big time. We’ve had leads and give them up. They don’t beat us, we beat ourselves. We need to try and do a better job next time. The third quarter we did a great job and came back and got the lead. Then maybe we laid down a little bit. The turnovers killed us in the end. We have to bounce back on Friday, we don’t want to lose two games in a row at home."

Andre Miller - Nuggets Guard
"We are giving away games. We were up fourteen or sixteen points in the fourth quarter. We gave up almost 40 in the fourth, we deserve to lose."

On the design of the last play
"Get to the basket. Either make a play for somebody else, get Carmelo the ball. They knew who the ball was gonna go to, so I went to the basket to make a play."

On the possibility of looking ahead to Friday and Saturday
"I don’t think so. It was a weird game from the start, a lot of missed free-throws. The third quarter we picked it up. The energy was there. Once the fourth quarter started, they got into a rhythm and hit some big shots. I don’t think we relaxed, they just hit shots and got to the free-throw line. We’ve been together for a while so we know we need games like this, anytime you give games away like this it doesn’t help. We played some good basketball, but four or five games it could have easily went the other way. Just move on to the next game."

HAWKS QUOTES

Mike Woodson - Atlanta Hawks Head Coach
"The win was huge. Denver is a well coached team, a team full of talent. We were a little undersized. We had so many guys out, Josh Childress and Speedy Claxton, we were undermanned, but I’ll tell you, you have to tip your hats to those guys in the locker room because it’s been like that all season. They just don’t quit. They compete from beginning to end. We were down early in the fourth quarter huge, we just kept chipping away and made play after play until we finally secured the win. I thought we forgot how to run our offense in the third period. It was ridiculous we threw the ball all over the place and they were able to capitalize and build the big lead. But we just kept chipping away and made play after play. It was beautiful to see."

Salim Stoudamire - Hawks Guard
"There’s two ways to go, either you let down or you rise together. I thought that we rose together. Even when we were down 17, we still believed in one another and we never gave up. As far as myself, I haven’t been playing at all, but I’ve been getting a lot of minutes lately. Tonight I just wanted to come out and take advantage of that. I was trying to be aggressive and just fit in tonight and offer something to the game.”

Shelden Williams - Hawks Forward
"My only concern tonight was my shoulder. It kind of bothered me the first two free-throws. I just tried to put it out of my mind. We had a lot of guys out, especially our key players and we had to come out with a lot of fight against a good team. We showed the character of our team tonight. Hopefully we can take this win on the West Coast and keep the motivation going."