Avery Johnson Defense Quotations

We really liked the way he played defense this summer and the way he was able to get us into some of our offense. I made a special trip to Utah (summer league) just to see him play.

If the commissioner changed the schedule and you had to play three or four games in a row, championship teams still find a way to win. So we don't use tired as an excuse. We didn't deserve to win. We weren't very efficient offensively. And give their defense credit. They did a good job of limiting Dirk and Josh's looks late in the game. They have a lot of pride in their locker room.

He has been a big part of what we're doing. He's a guy in our starting lineup that I don't have to call a play for, (a guy) who just plays defense and rebounds. That's good for us. We needed a guy who doesn't want the ball. We wouldn't be here without him.

When he's on his game and he's playing tough, hard-nosed defense and getting rebounds, getting some assists, guarding one of the better perimeter players and scoring, I'm a much better coach.

We thought we got our defense under us in the first half and kind of set the tone for the rest of the game. We had a little lull defensively in the third quarter, but they're a very good offensive basketball team and they weren't going to come out of the locker room lying down.

We are fortunate to get out of here with a victory. Both teams played some really awesome defense and we just couldn't get our offense in gear in the second half. This is another game that we proved to ourselves that we can win basketball games with our defense. I don't know if we would have won this game in the past. Now we are a different team.

He was one of the first coaches that came in and started talking about winning a championship and winning it with defense and don't even make apologies about it. Don't blink. Don't even blink when you talk about it. That's the goal. Don't be ashamed about it, otherwise you're just selling tickets.

I thought this was our best performance of the series. We talked about playing tough, hard-nosed defense tonight to try and close this series out.

I thought this was a gutsy performance by our team. Cleveland really jumped out on us and put us in a big hole and our team responded in the second half. Our third quarter defense was pretty special.

Our first quarter defensively really set the tone. We worked on a lot of stuff this morning. They (Atlanta) missed a lot of shots but the defense was better than it was in that last game (against Golden State). We just threw out that last game.

That was one of the reasons why we won that first quarter, ... Doug was running the offense a lot of the time, and his on-the-ball defense is always good.

We got off to a good start in the first quarter and set the tone for the whole game. I thought our defense was pretty steady...we tried to contest as many shots as we could.

We thought our first-quarter defense really set the tone. We worked on a lot of stuff this morning and we were fortunate to have some carry over.

We thought our defense and offense was good in the first half, but in the second we struggled. We had one turnover in the first and 10 in the second half. That is something we will take a look at.

We were fortunate enough get some stops and play some tough, hard-nosed defense. This is the fifth win on a five-game road trip. We have been on the road eleven or twelve days and we played some pretty good defense against a team scoring 150, 120 and 115 points, so I am awfully proud of our guys.

We're disappointed with the way we finished the game. Our defense wasn't very good tonight. We gave up 65 points in the second half. We had a lot of things go wrong defensively.

They had a great start to the game. They came out and really tried to throw a knockout punch on us. Fortunately, we were able to withstand it, come back and get our defense set and play some pretty good defense against a high-scoring team in the second, third and fourth quarters.

That first-quarter defense probably was as good as I've seen in a long time. No matter who you do it to, when you hold a team to 10 points in a quarter, that's pretty special.