HEAD COACH STAN VAN GUNDY
(On his team overcoming a 15-point deficit): “At that point I sensed that we weren’t playing very well. I don’t know what turned it. Guys made a lot better of an effort on the defensive end of the floor. We started getting back and shots started going in the basket. We played with more energy. I have absolutely no idea what turned it. I wish I did, because then I could do it every night. We played really well over the last 30 minutes of that game.”
(On his team guarding LeBron James): “I’ve coached against LeBron a lot of times, including in a playoff series. Sometimes he misses and sometimes he doesn’t. You do as good a job as you can, and that’s what it comes down to. I’ve had LeBron hit me for 50 (points), so I’ve got no answers on how to play him. I haven’t seen a guy in the league who can lock him down. He had a bad night. I thought our guys didn’t give him stuff easy and I thought they worked, but you don’t lock him down. He missed tonight, thank God.”
(On his team’s improved play): “We’re 7-23. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re certainly playing better. We’ve still got a long, long way to go, particularly at the defensive end. But today was a step forward.”
PISTONS CENTER ANDRE DRUMMOND
(On guarding LeBron James): “I think it gave my team a little boost to know that I was really paying attention to our game plan. I didn’t try to swat the shots, knowing that he might get a foul called. I really just kept my hands up and let him come to me.”
PISTONS FORWARD JONAS JEREBKO
(On his team overcoming a 15-point deficit): “We just started playing together. We didn’t play our game in the first half. We were down by 15, so it shows a lot of resilience in our team to come back and then finish the way we did. I think it was a statement game for us. We’ve got to play together and we can play this way.”
CAVALIERS HEAD COACH DAVID BLATT
(On the tonight’s game): "I thought we started extremely well but we lost our energy and we lost our competitiveness, and that shouldn’t happen."
(On the team’s turnovers): "I thought that we were very careless with the ball. If you look at our team, in particularly that stat, it’s very telling as to not only the result but how we play. Every game is going to have a certain number of turnovers but there are games when the multi-turnover effect is more due to yourself than it is to your opponent. You’re going to turn the ball over 10 or 11 times no matter what because the other guys are good and they’re playing. But when you start getting up to the numbers that we’ve been at recently, you know you’re just being careless with the ball."
(On what he can do to improve the team’s lack of energy and competitiveness): "There’s a lot of different things you can do but I obviously I didn’t succeed in any one of them."
(On the team’s two losses at home over their last 11 games): “We’re going through a few things right now. We lost some pretty important players. On one hand, it’s easy to overlook and just say ‘Hey, everyone step it up and it’s going to be okay’. On the other hand, it’s tough. You miss those guys, but it’s just at that point where you have to be more competitive, more determined and fight your way through that unless this happens. It’s not an excuse…We didn’t fight enough to battle the difficulties that we had anyway. We gotta fight harder than that and play better.”
CAVALIERS FORWARD LEBRON JAMES
(On what contributed to the loss tonight): “I think turnovers. I was very careless tonight with the ball, a couple unforced turnovers. And those boys, they shot the heck out of the ball.”
(On the number of three-point shots made by the Pistons): “A lot of them were contested and some of them were in transition on 1-on-4s (fast breaks). We just have to do a better job, have a little more sense of urgency, but don’t discredit what they did to us. They beat us pretty good.”
(On if this loss felt different): “A loss is a loss. Tonight, no matter who you’re going to play against, I’m going to continue to say, that everyone wants to play us and everyone is going to get up to play us now. Once we start to understand that, we’ll have a better understanding once we go out on the floor.”
(On the team still learning): “Every game is a learning experience. We’re not a very good team, as far as on the court. We’re still trying to find our way as well. We’ve won some good games, we’ve lost some games. But right now, we’re just not very good at every aspect of the game that we need to be to compete every night. We have to continue to get better, we have to continue to watch the film sessions, we have to continue to do everything we need to do to get better. We’ll be alright.”
CAVALIERS CENTER TRISTAN THOMPSON
(On if the recent losses at home are concerning): “No, that’s just how the game goes. Sometimes some teams come out, and they came out ready tonight. They made shots. We did force them to get into the second action (play) but at the same time, they’re making shots. They shot a real high percentage from the three-point line, so that’s something that we have to live with. It was just one of those games where we look back at it and see what we can do better and it’s off to Atlanta.”
(On if the loss tonight was surprising): “You could say the same thing when we played OKC last year, we beat them in OKC and we beat them at home. Some games, teams come out ready to play. For us, we want to protect the home court. We failed to do it tonight and we just have to move on.”
CAVALIERS FORWARD KEVIN LOVE
(On difficulty sustaining a lead): “We were just flat tonight. I thought they had a lot of buckets in transition, a lot of threes hit tonight. It was just a tough game for us and we need to respond on the road.”
(On fixing lack of competitiveness): “I think it’s compounded quite a bit when we turn the ball over. Sometimes when that happens or we let somebody get the easy bucket, we hang our heads. When we don’t play with pace, when we don’t score the ball at a high clip, it affects us and every part of the game. I can’t tell you what it was. We need to play better in front of our home crowd, home fans. It’s just unacceptable.”