Postgame Quotes: 05/15/03

On Tony Parker - “He did a great job of getting us that lead early and putting us in the position to jump out of the gates. His aggressiveness not only on the offensive end, but the defensive end is important for us to come out and set a tone. He really helped us do that early, and we were able to carry that intensity throughout the game.”

On the game – “They didn’t make some shots for a stretch there… those guys have come back in games that we have been up so much. We just did not want to let up all. We just wanted to play it all the way through to the end. They are the three time defending Champs and they tried to make a run. Luckily our defense was pretty good. I thought that Bruce [Bowen] and Mano [Emanuel Ginobili] and Jack [Stephen Jackson] and those guys did a great job with making every shot that Kobe got tough. We got a couple turnovers down the stretch there and Tony Parker did a great job of getting in that middle and making some shots.”

On scoring role shifting in this series - "It was a little difficult at first because after being used to getting 10-shots, and knowing the double team was coming, my teammates did an incredible job making shots and really taking over that first series. Then coming in to this series they decided to let me do what I had to do and shut down everybody else. It kind of came hard because some of my shots didn’t feel great early on… We won the series and made some shots. It is great."

On the difference from Game 5 to Game 6 - “I think last game. We were not happy with the way we finished the that game, so we understood that we had to come out and do things differently, try to get the lead and just sustain it this time.”

Bruce Bowen on Tim Duncan - “That is the MVP of the league. He knew he had to step up big in the fourth quarter this whole season… and he just took it to another level in the playoffs.”

On Coach Pop - “I thank Coach Pop [Popovich]. You need to give him a lot of credit… He gave me, Mano [Emanuel Ginobili] and Jack [Stephen Jackson] a lot of freedom. He called plays for us, and tried to create and penetrate… We have a lot of weapons out there.”

On closing out the series in Game 6 - “All the games in the regular season and even some of in the playoffs we lost our big leads because we didn’t do those things in the fourth quarter. We just took advantage of things. We had them down, smelt blood and just put our foot on them and pushed them all the way down.”

On feelings tonight - "We are severely disappointed we couldn’t make a run for the championship and get our opportunity to win a fourth. It tells us something about how difficult it is and how much dedication and discipline you have to have to win 4 years in a row. We’ve had a great run and we’ve had our fans support us tremendously. We had a great play. We gotten a little bit older, we suffered some injuries, we had a difficult year, as I told them , in the locker room about 40 minutes ago after the ball game. We talked sincerely about making correct steps from the beginning of our season to the end, which places us in a position to win. When you make correct decisions and do thing correctly your expectations of winning are fulfilled especially when you put the effort in. This year we couldn’t do that, we couldn’t make the correct steps. We stumbled, we fell, we had inconsistencies, we lacked some discipline as a basketball club and we paid the price for it."

On tonight - "I think every year you try to repeat. But what you have to understand is that teams reload and they restock and they try to dethrone you. They reloaded with the right ammo with what they needed to battle. We had an opportunity and they played like a better team this series. We put up a good fight we took this team to six games. We had a few pieces of the puzzle go down, which shortened up our bench a lot but nonetheless we still had a opportunity to win this series."

On the better team - "The Spurs were the better. We beat them the past two years. We knew what we were capable of. We just never kept that fire. The Spurs were the team this year.”

On the season - “We had an unbelievable run. When Phil came we enjoyed nothing but success. This is the first time we’re not feeling success. We just have to suck it up and start this all over again next year. A lot of things caught up with the team. Injuries…we struggled to win 50 games, if we didn’t let a few of those games slip away we could have had fourth place. We were a totally different team this year and it caught up with us. But now we can rest and regroup and hopefully start a new run this year. Good thing about american sports is that there’s always a next year.”

On the Spurs - “People are going to say we were the better team, but they played extremely well. They had a game plan and executed it extremely well and we didn’t execute as well as we should have. You just have to take your hat off to those guys.”