Suns-Mavs Quotes: 12/04/2008

(Where’s the defense gone in the last week – especially when it comes to dealing with start players?) “Yeah, we really did. Now, the last four or five games guys have gotten career highs, everybody’s gotten career highs. Tonight we had four guys get career [or season] highs on us – rebounds, points, point, points. Just haven’t done a good job of taking initiative and taking a challenge. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to get back to taking a challenge and guarding your guy. Sometimes it’s scheme situations where guys haven’t helped, but other times initially it all starts with you as an individual first. I know there’s no doubt we’ll get better at it, but we just can’t get off to those types of starts.”

(Did the effort hurt you guys in the first half more than anything?) “I just thought we had so many break downs early on stuff we should know and we’ve got to have a better consistency level and not doing that. We can’t have the same mistakes over and over again from game to game. Some of these things now should start to creep in. The rebound thing, that’s tough. Sometimes it’s the big has come over to help and his guy ends up with the ball offensively and that hurts sometimes rebounding-wise. But other times we’ve got guys there and they just out work us and get them. So, that’s an area we’ve got to do a much better job at. These last two games we’ve allowed teams to outwork us on the offensive boards and that really hurt us.”

(What’s the ceiling for JJ Barea?) “He adds a different dimension to the team. He’s playing well so he deserves to be playing. The challenge for him is going to be to continue to play at this level because teams are going to start game planning more for him. He was key tonight. He helped get us off to a good start. I thought his energy early was something that helped us at both ends. When we hit the lull in fourth, you know, we put in the pick-and-roll. He made a couple of big plays and got the wheels back on the wagon. He played a very important part of the game.”

(Do you see Barea improving defensively?) “He always battles. He can improve more if he’d grow four inches but I don’t see that happening. Guys that are his size, they’ve got to make up for it other ways. They’ve got to be tough to guard offensively and they’ve got to battle defensively. They’ve got to be active and good reactors to the ball. He battles out there. That’s why he’s playing.”

(On Dampier’s game tonight) “Damp’s quietly had an exceptional year. Because we have two quality centers, he doesn’t player starters’ minutes most of the time. But his rebounds per minute and his productivity in terms of his presence in the paint is something would be hard for us to replace right now. He’s extremely important where they have dominant centers coming in here, you know, Yao, Shaq, (Dwight) Howard. He’s done a good job playing even against some of the smaller guys. It was tough for him the other night (vs. LAC on 12/2) because he didn’t play many minutes at all because of matchups and he’s got a lot of pride so tonight, I think, he was making a point.”

(On Jason Terry’s contributions) “He’s been great all year. Tonight was one of his lesser games and he still played really well. The decision to go with JJ really was to allow us the opportunity to go to JET off the bench to get a lift with what he’s been doing. In the second half, we had to come to him a litter earlier than I’d hoped, but he came out there and made things happen right away. He and Dirk (Nowitzki) had a good feel for each other, they play off each other well and we just need him to continue doing what’s he’s doing.”