(On whether Tony Parker will rest on back-to-backs…)
“I’ll see how he feels, how he does, how his body looks like, but I don’t think that. That’s not what I’m thinking right now.”
(On Tony Parker’s health…)
“He didn’t have anything that was individually limiting as far as being serious like a pulled hamstring, a high ankle sprain, or anything like that. He had nagging injuries that time usually takes care of. I think hopefully we made sure that we kept him out longer than one might think to make sure those things are gone.”
(On how the Mavericks have played this season…)
“They added some good talent to that team. Those guards that they added are pretty special. It doesn’t surprise me a bit. Of course Dirk (Nowitzki), he’s going to play until people put him in cuffs and take him out of the gym. He’s like Timmy (Duncan). He’s a wonderful player. You know he’s going to play well, but they added a lot of talent to that club.”
(On finding ways to win in games with high numbers of turnovers…)
“Success in a game isn’t always because of one thing. In all of those games, we ended up probably making a decent amount of threes, I would imagine. That saved us on several occasions. Down the stretch, we played pretty good defense in most of those situations. It’s not something we want, to have that many turnovers, that’s for sure.”
(On playing too aggressively on the perimeter…)
“I think it’s playing too quickly. In that sense, I mean playing fast than solid. We were trying to make some passes that weren’t there, were too anxious to score or score in a hurry maybe. Sometimes we’re not strong with the ball as far as it’s a pretty physical game. It’s much more physical and I keep thinking I missed a memo along the way somewhere. I think it’s a lot more physical out on the perimeter than it was two, three, four years ago. It just sort of morphed into that. We have to get used to that.”
(On getting injured players back into the rotation…)
“As each guy comes back, it’s a different combination again. Hopefully as Tony (Parker) comes back, maybe we can limit that by three or four (turnovers) a game.”
(On Allen Iverson’s retirement…)
“He was on the floor more than Tony (Parker). He was getting knocked around like a ping-pong ball, and he’d just come back for more. He was a hell of a competitor. We had some rules that we used with Allen (Iverson) on the court where we wanted to guard him and which way we wanted to push him. It didn’t work out very often. You thought about him a lot and he took up a lot of your scouting report, that’s for sure.”