Maurice Cheeks Good Quotations

Certainly, he's not as good as A.I. now, but as time moves on, maybe he will. Who knows that?

I'm always thinking that something good is going to happen. I think if you go in there thinking, 'Yeah, you're going to get beat by 20,' there's no sense of us going. There's no sense of us getting on the plane and going to Chicago and giving us a chance.

For three quarters, our defense was very good tonight.

It certainly will give us a boost to get ready for the second half. We needed a boost to get us back feeling good about ourselves and playing against a team like San Antonio, the defending champions, gives you a chance to feel good about yourselves.

Our defense wasn't as good as it has been, but he was making some incredible shots. He kept them in the game.

We need one. We're entitled to one, I think. We've been going down to the wire a lot of games. Sometimes it feels good for the players and myself to play a game where you don't have to worry about somebody getting an offensive rebound or making a last-second shot to win a basketball game. For us, we needed that.

Yesterday was a great practice with guys who came back like Johnny (Salmons) who was very good yesterday, and Kyle (Korver) and Andre (Iguodala). They uplifted the practice with the guys who are here trying to make a team. Everybody played pretty well. It was a great practice yesterday,

We had some good players, we had some good guys on the team, but some things kept happening time after time and that's all people talked about, ... The things that they did, the dysfunctional things that happened, a lot of that became a part of the Portland Trail Blazers, and that was unfortunate.

When you play a team like Miami, you cannot start the way we started. You put yourself in such a hole, and you have to climb out of it. You can't do that against a good team. They space the floor, they have a great post player. ... Then they spread the floor with their shooters.

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.

First of all, New Jersey is a very good basketball team. We're working our way back. We started out good and they started making some shots. Vince (Carter) made some shots and our defense still has to get better.

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 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.

Any time you lose and you continue to lose, you take it. You have to have something good happen to you to turn your mental state over, and the only way you do that is to win a game. As you continue to lose, you feel it.

I'm very anxious to see how he plays. I don't have any second-guessing that he will not play the same. He's been very good at the things he's been doing - driving the ball, running the team. I'm very interested to see him out there in a game situation.

I knew Randy would be on someone's bench because he's a very good basketball coach. That's not a secret.

I just thought we needed something good to happen to us to feel good about ourselves and these two wins are big for us.

I know he's going to catch lobs, but those should be added bonuses to his game, to being a pretty good defender and opening up his jump shot, slashing a little bit. Just being more of an important offensive player, than just the guy that's just slashing to the basket.

He's a pretty good one-on-one player, a pretty good defender. We're just trying to get him back in the flow, let him get some practice time.