Pelicans Head Coach Alvin GentryOn tonight’s win and Coach Gentry’s saying he’s never seen a bad win:“No, especially against that team. I told you, their record is no indication of the kind of team that they are. I told you guys, they play hard. Bud (Mike Budenholzer) has done a great job of taking the talent that he has and have them execute, shoot the ball extremely well, from five all the way down to the twelfth guy on the bench. They spread you out and they make it really tough. I thought the thing that they did a really good job of is that every time one of our bigs touched the ball, they had not one, not two, but three guys around so I thought they did about as good of a job as you can do on our bigs. We found other guys that stepped up and obviously Darius (Miller) played a great game and I thought E’Twaun (Moore) was really good. Jrue (Holiday) had a great game in the sense that we needed him to be a facilitator and do some things and engineer and I thought he did a great job.”
On Darius Miller’s performance:“We know that he can shoot the ball and that’s one of the reasons we brought him in. I thought he did a really good job of using the screens and getting himself open, shake action is what we call it, where he’s coming behind some of our bigs rolling to the basket. He put himself in a good position to catch and shoot it and that’s one of his strong suits.”
Pelicans Forward Darius Miller:On fourth quarter performance:“All of us get a lot of open shots. (Anthony) Davis and (DeMarcus) Cousins demand so much attention, we need to knock them down.”
On the bench lifting the team:“We keep saying (we need to make) open looks (when teams are) sending three to four guys on Davis and Cousins and need to keep knocking them down.”
Pelicans Forward Anthony Davis:On ugly win:“We will go look back at it tomorrow, but we won. It’s tough to get wins in the league and have to take care of home court. A lot of turnovers tonight…we had to fight, but we made two plays at the end. Tough call on the charge at the end, and I don’t know what I was – trying not to travel and go out of bounds and throwing the ball away. Luckily (we) got a stop and we got a win.”
On if last year New Orleans would have lost this game when things don’t go their way for the first three quarters:“We battled for the whole 48 minutes, kept fighting, and once we cut it close we took the lead and sustained the lead. The only thing that hurt us is the turnovers. The more we turn the ball over, the harder we make the game for ourselves. When we don’t turn it over, we are a pretty good team. We just have to limit our turnovers. We had (13) in the (first) half, not sure how many we ended with.”