Brian Hill Games Quotations

My father always told me just worry about the things you can control and don't worry about anything else. I can't control the number of games we play. As long as we keep playing the way we're playing, that's the most important thing to me.

I don't know whether you can call it a trend or not. But it's two games now where we've been better with the basketball offensively.

We haven't stopped talking about it and that's where we are. We have games coming up with people ahead of us, Chicago, Philadelphia, Indiana, and that's certainly not overlooking tomorrow's game against Atlanta.

We haven't ever stopped talking about it. We still have games against the people in front of us. . . . I said it before the season, during the season and I said it recently, it's all going to be decided in Game 82. Those six, seven and eight spots are going to be decided on the last day of the season.

What we did this year has no bearing on how many games we win next year. There has to be a commitment in the off-season to get better, and there has to be a commitment when we come back to training camp. If we make that commitment, then we'll be a better basketball team.

We'll see how we do against them. That's the nice thing about having games down the stretch -- you might as well test yourself against the best. This will be the first time we've played Detroit since we've made the changes in our team. We'll see how far we've come.

With the number of games we have left to go, the one thing we refuse to let happen is we're not going to come out and go through the motions. It doesn't matter who's out there playing as far as I'm concerned. We're just going to play the people who play the hardest.

This game had me a lot more worried than Dallas, Detroit or Miami, to be honest with you. Against those teams, you know your guys are going to play at the top of their game . . . in the beginning of the game, it was very similar to our past games (against the Hawks) -- too much dribble penetration and too many offensive rebounds.

It tells you clearly the fans are voting purely on entertainment value and obviously the home turnout in certain cities. Yao Ming was voted an All-Star starter. How many games did he miss? But there's a lot of people voting in China.

It's a setback for us, but I feel bad for Grant with everything he's gone through the past five years. He had a very productive summer and he felt great coming out of it, and he had a great training camp. For our team, it's just a situation where we have to step up. Collectively, we have to step up and make up for the loss. But the games still go on.