Avery Johnson Points Quotations

Points are hard to come by against Memphis, and it's been that way for everybody because of their tempo ... and their defensive scheme. We've got to place a premium on getting good shots.

We were climbing uphill all night long. We thought if we could have had a normal quarter offensively and not be in the hole down by 20 points like we were in the first quarter, then we'd be OK.

I sure hope we're different. We seem to have been playing more physical basketball on the defensive end. Again, that was just one of those special games, the guy got on fire and obviously, since that's happened, we're not the team he's scored the most points against.

Our team has made some progress with being proactive on defense. There's a certain mentality where I wanted us to be. ... Forget statistics, forget about how many points we're giving up, field goal percentage, all that stuff - I think our body language is moving in a way that we're trying to be a little more proactive defensively.

We tried to bother him and make it hard on him. He's been averaging 50 points on us and we didn't want that to happen (again).

We're not playing any defense. They shot 55 percent from the field and score 56 points in the first half. You're not going to win many games in this league playing like that. We've definitely taken a step back in that area.

Teams are coming in here dropping 30-some points on us in the first quarter. We've been digging ourselves in a hole, so I'll continue to work on finding the right formula to help get us off to better starts. Maybe I won't call timeouts as quick as I used to. We'll have to do something.

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.

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.

We had to get this game behind us for a lot of reasons. We hadn't played well this year against Lakers, and Kobe's been averaging 50 points on us. We didn't want that to happen again.

We just had to make some points about it. We've got to play our best basketball to win Game 1.