Detroit: Lawrence Frank | Greg Monroe | Brandon Knight Toronto: Dwane Casey | Aaron Gray | DeMar DeRozanPistons Head Coach Lawrence Frank
What was your message to your team before tonight’s game? We’ve shown what we are capable of on both ends of the spectrum. We are going to need everyone to do their part in order to give us the best chance to win.
How surprised were you by Rodney’s (Stuckey) performance tonight? It’s the game like we’ve talked about. In a lockout shortened season you always have to be ready, you never know what’s going on; there are a lot of games and a lot of minutes so some nights you are better than others.
The way your team is constructed, it’s hard to win when you don’t get any productivity out of Rodney Stuckey… We have enough to win; we win and go with the guys that are going well. That’s what you do, that’s why you have a team. It’s the next man up because no one is going to play great for 82 games, that’s a proven fact and it’s why you have a full compliment and a team roster to step up.
This is a game that got away from you but you continued to fight until the end… Yeah, tonight we didn’t come out with the focus that we needed to come out with. It’s one of those games that you have to be at the highest level of focus. You don’t want to skip this game to get to the All-Star Break, but I think we kind of did that and we have to find a way to stay focused no matter what the circumstances are.
Talk about the disappointment of not getting a win over the past two games… It’s two games that we definitely wanted to win. We had some good momentum going into these two games, we’ll have to take this break and regroup and find the same energy and focus that we had in those games that we were winning.
Did the (Jerryd Bayless) foul fire you up at all? No, I was already fired up. We just didn’t play well; I don’t know what was going on. I know that we can play better than that. They just wanted to come out and win more than us.
Did you guys just fall too far behind to come back tonight? No we didn’t, it was just a situation where we could have fought a little bit harder. We didn’t feel like we came out with the energy that we came out with in the past few games and as a result we lost this one by double digits and weren’t able to recover.
Thoughts on your first half season… It’s been alright. For me, it’s just as long as I am getting better that’s really what it’s all about. I don’t really like to assess myself, I just like to make sure I’m progressing and look towards the future as far as what I can do to continue to improve.
It was a balanced game from everyone… Yes it was. I thought we had a good effort from start to finish. It got a little shaky there towards the end, when they started doing the Hack-A-Aaron (Gray). Usually Aaron is a pretty good free throw shooter and we shot a lot of free throws this week fortunately. I thought the guys competed. I thought we got our defensive focus back and we started doing a better job as the game went on with our pick-and-rolls.
You did a good job containing their guards tonight… That’s what our major concern was. We did a better job on bigs and I put in on our bigs a couple of times in the first half, they sashayed to the basket and we called a timeout and got on the bigs because they weren’t in their position. I put some of it on the guards but I put a lot of it on the bigs, it’s a team defence. We didn’t do it as well in the first half but as the game went on we did a better job.
Thoughts on Ed Davis’ play tonight… Eddie did a good job I thought with his paint presence. I was concerned about him against (Greg) Monroe, but he did a heck of a job against him. On the boards he did a solid job, he ended up with six, two offensive. He had some big rebounds for us and I was really happy to see him battle in the paint.
Thoughts on the game … It’s just exciting to win. We didn’t finish as well as we wanted to, but to win this game going into the All-Star Break is going to make us feel a lot better.
Did the four days off help? The four days really helped us. I think we got a lot of good days of practice in, we got some rest and guys got healthy. We came out with energy tonight and really executed the game plan well. Teammates really stepped up and like I said, it’s good to win.
Thoughts on the win… We definitely needed that and I hope it carries over into the second half of the season. Detroit has been playing extremely well, so that was a good test for us.
What did the team work on the past four days? We worked on a lot of late game situations and executing plays. We know we can lock down on the defensive end; it’s all about executing on the offensive end.