Rick Carlisle Playing Quotations

We're going up against a guy who's playing a superhuman brand of basketball. He's looked invincible.

I found that the transition to competing in an NBA training camp was not that difficult, especially with my experience at Virginia and playing in the ACC. Fortunately, I kind of caught lightning in a bottle that year, had a great training camp and made the team.

He's at the point now where rookies are still rookies, but they have a veteran sort of confidence about them, and he should. The other thing he has learned this year is that when he plays well, it's going to be tougher to keep playing well because teams are going to keep getting ready for you.

Jack is such an important guy on our team. Our players view him as one of our leaders. You have to have your top players involved and playing at a high level. I thought tonight Jack understood the defensive end was going to be what was going to win the game for us.

I thought defensively we were playing soft (in the first half) and not playing the type of game we needed to play to give ourselves a chance. The third quarter we came out with a lot of more aggression, and the third quarter was the key quarter.

Jermaine adds a different type of post-up dimension. Getting Jermaine back, we're going to be playing quite differently than we are now because of those dynamics. It's a challenge. We still have a lot of stuff to get in. It's going to take every bit of concentration that we have as a team.

Our undoing was the fact we're not playing 48 minutes at home at a high level. That's got to change.

Our point guard position was really tremendous, especially in the second half. That's the kind of production we need at all our positions. Let's face it, we're the kind of team right now where we're playing eight guys (Friday). We need six out of eight (players) playing at a high level to beat a team like Sacramento.

It does affect us not having Jermaine O'Neal for sure, but if you don't have him, you have to find a way to win without him. Right now, that has got to mean playing at full capacity all the time and playing with some real efficiency.

I thought in the second half, we did a good job of sticking with what we had to do to give ourselves a chance. Our undoing is not playing 48 minutes at that level.

We have to help him get into some more positions where he doesn't have to use his off-arm to get open. We have to adjust. He's going to have to adjust a little bit. We've got to have him on the floor. We're not going to be able to win the series with him playing 31 minutes a game. There's just no way.

Three days ago it looked like it might be a possibility. He is doing better. It's just not the right time to push it. Also, if we would have did it, he would have been playing a game without almost any practice time leading up to it, which would have been hard. It makes it tough because he does a good job on (Shaquille O'Neal).

When we're playing well, there are very few teams that are as good as us. When things don't go well for us, that's when we have to look in the mirror as a group and figure out how to collect ourselves and continue on a path that's the best way for winning. We've got some soul searching to do.

Yao has been playing great for a long stretch. I thought our guys battled him and did a good job in a lot of areas, but we could have done better as a team. You give up 38, that's a lot.

We're excited to move up in the standings by winning. I wish I could say we are playing really good basketball, but we obviously have struggled. It's been a tough road. We've got some things to do to look more like a team that can really compete at a high level in the playoffs.

We had the game going pretty well and we were playing good basketball. They made a run at the end of the half and they got the game tied and I thought that gave them a lot of momentum going into the second half. They did a great job of finishing off plays.

We got ourselves in some holes in the first half and haven't been able to dig out of them. They were playing (at the outset) their game better than we were playing ours.

Anthony Johnson played a terrific game. He's playing with great aggressiveness and savvy and understanding the pulse of the team he is running.

The whole game we were shooting in the 30s and we could never get anything going offensively to set up our defense. When you get behind big you end up taking more 3s than you want to take, and 32 is a number that's too many. If you're taking that many, you're probably playing from behind and not in a very good position.

They are a well-balanced team that has become very efficient at both ends of the floor. I think (coach Maurice) Cheeks has done a great job of figuring out a lineup. A lot of it is going to come back to Iverson and Webber because they are two great players. Iverson, in the last two weeks, he's been playing by his standards at a higher level.

They're both probably going to be playing multiple positions, so that can also make it tricky. But I expect both of them to be into the action pretty quickly.

(Assistant coach) Kevin O'Neil came up with the idea of playing some zone. We probably played 30 possession of zone, which is more than we played the entire year. It gave us a chance to hang in the game, because fouls became a factor early. With zone, a little bit of it is pot-luck. You have to hope they miss some shots.

It's bad news that we had an opportunity to move up and didn't, but it's good news that everybody lost. Right now, that stuff isn't as important as how we're playing over a course of 48 minutes. We have to tighten some areas to give ourselves a chance to win against anybody.

It's about winning games, and right now, we have to focus in on the guys we have and doing our best possible job at playing at a high level to give ourselves a chance to win.

It's about learning the league, learning the guys he's playing against, what their tendencies are and what their strengths are because those are important things to defend well, ... We have a system of defense that's solid and he's in the process of learning that. For him, he's an experienced enough player and certainly has a high enough basketball IQ that he can pick it up quickly.

That's something the medical people have to discuss. It's a conversation I haven't been involved in and I don't know what point it's at. You have to look at the long-term future of a young player as well as the short-term gains you have by playing him.

It's important to be playing well and we played better the last three games. If we hadn't won three straight games, we could easily be out of the playoff picture.

It was a deceptive final score. It was obviously a very difficult game. Our bench struggled, but the guys that started held it together. Anthony Johnson played just a tremendous all around game. He's really playing at a high level right now. He is getting the job done, simply as that.

Anytime you're on a losing streak you want to get out of it. As we found out last year, they're no fun. They never are. You have to fight your way out of it as a team. I thought the guys really did that by playing together.

The last couple games we've gotten things back on track a little bit and we've got to keep going in that vein. We still are not in (the playoffs). We have a long way to go. We're going to have to win our way in because everybody else we're fighting against has got favorable schedules and are playing well.

He's struggled lately shooting the ball and I was concerned he was due to come out of it. He's playing very well. What he's doing defensively has everybody in the league taking notice.

He's experienced and has played him a lot. He's done well with him in the past and he's the best guy that we have. We're fortunate that he's feeling better for a game that we're playing against the biggest, strongest guy in the game.

The margin for error for us is nonexistent. You have to really be great in all areas and playing at the highest (levels) in all areas. There were some things that happened that were mistakes that can't happen on the court. From a coaching standpoint, those things are part of the game and one of the things that makes it so difficult.

A.J. is playing with great awareness and great savvy. He looks like a guy that understands the pulse of the team he's running. The majority of the game, he's making our calls and directing us into things. He's a guy that really knows this team, as well as any player that I've had the opportunity to work with as a coach.

A.J. is playing with great awareness and great savvy. He just looks like a guy who understands the pulse of the team he runs. He knows his team as well as any player I've had an opportunity to coach.

You've got to keep playing and stay the course. We were able to get some big stops and Jermaine had a couple of key blocks. We're certainly happy to get on the winning side of the game.

You've go to keep playing and stay the course. We're in the midst of the playoff picture, and we'll have to win our way in. We're not going to back in.