Maurice Cheeks Last Quotations

I thought our focus the last couple of days was rebounding and defense, and it showed.

We've got to work a little harder, do the things that we did last night in terms of working and putting the effort out there and we'll be fine.

Coming into a building like this, playing a very good basketball team like this, you know if you get up 20 points they're going to make a run. They had a chance at the end. But our attention to detail was big, from the first minute of the game to the last minute.

They knew we played an overtime game last night. They came out pushing the ball and running the floor to keep us on our heels. That game was embarrassing for me and it was embarrassing for the players. It was an embarrassing loss.

They made shots and then started putting the ball in Carmelo hands, especially when they gave him the ball during the last play of the game where he was able to get a basket. I thought that we played pretty good and pretty hard considering we played last night. Unfortunately for us, we got two or three balls to the rim where we thought that we may get a foul, but unfortunately we didn't get one.

We've got some young players that played well last year and I want to see if they've improved this year,

They tried to run us from the beginning knowing that we played last night. They did a good job. We did get back into it late, but were never really a threat.

They're just fighting to get a second seed. We're trying to get a seed so it means a lot more to us to go out there and play the way we've been playing the last few games.

He (Howard) is great, young and energetic and always fighting. On that last play where a lot of players just stay put after a shot, he continued to play and ended up getting the big play.

He had some flu-like symptoms last night. He just came to the game and felt OK to play. It got worse.

It's always easy when we get beat to beat ourselves up. We've got to get better on defense and our offense has slipped the last couple games. We're going to get there.

Not at all. We just need to play the way we have been playing the last couple of games.

I knew it would be a lot like the last three games we had, and we'd have to win it down the stretch. We had a lot of guys step up when AI went down.