Doc Rivers Good Quotations

I love Courtney Lee. He's a very good player. I know that sounds very simple, but it's true. He does things well. He's a good defender, a great team defender, and he shoots the ball very well.

Somebody asked me, 'How many times are you going to do this. As many as it takes. It's good for the guys, but not for me.

He's a great scorer every night. It's the other things that he's done for this team that just keeps giving us hope that . . . with the things that we can add, we can be a good basketball team in the near future.

He's been fantastic. Early in the year, there's no way we put him on the floor. Offensively he's been pretty good all year. But now, he understands how to get his shot.

I thought about getting my All-Star ballot back and putting Jake on it. He's not going to be a guy who gets you 30 points a night, but every night, he's willing to do the dirty stuff. He wants to bang. He's going to have good nights and bad nights, but he's an excellent guy to have on your team.

I thought some guys gave good effort tonight, but some have their luggage in mind on the plane already. Turnovers and shot selection killed us.

That was a great win for us. We had control of it at times, but you know New Jersey is going to fight back because they are so talented. I thought it was nice that when they did fight back, and took the lead, we kept our composure. We kept fighting, and good things happen when you do that.

Wally and Paul played so well off each other. Well, everybody did a great job. The defense, at times, was really good with the rotations, and I just thought the ball moved great.

(The win) was huge. You know going out on the road having lost two tough ones (if we lost this one) would not have been a good scenario for us. At least we know we can hang in games and win.

The defense was good for the most part all night. I thought early on, Chris Paul, that was the game plan, just try to get the ball out of his hands and make somebody else make plays.

Tonight was good because it was against a team that had to win. When we got down, we could have gone the other way. It was a conscious choice by our guys to stay in the game. I was really proud of them.

Even if we got it up court, we wouldn't have gotten a good shot off. It's a tough loss. The game felt like the last team who had the ball was going to score. Nobody was playing defense on either team.

He's worried that it'll affect his knee. He said he didn't feel good at all out there.

He's young. Don't throw him out there too early. It's going to take him some time, and he's going to be a good player. I believe that.

He's just been engaged. We've been engaged with him. Mark and I, we've had a couple of good conversations this summer one right before the season started. We basically talked about a lot of things. I told him on my half I will just try to communicate better, but on his half the body language and all the other things have to be better. And if we were in a grading system he'd be an A-plus.

It was a good fourth quarter. A good learning tool.

As far away as we are, we are still very close to becoming a good team. When we decided to break this team down last year, letting Antoine (Walker) and Gary (Payton) go, we understood what that would mean. We still hoped to make the playoffs and that's disappointing, but I think this team will be better sooner rather than later.

They really came in to show us, prove a point, whatever you want to say. They came in and played great, so just give them credit. ... But their performance didn't sway me at all with the trade. The trade was a tremendous trade for us and, hopefully, a good trade for them. One thing about Mark and all of them, I hope they do well. I just didn't want them to do well against us.

He's not going to be a guy that will be featured on ESPN, but he may be a guy that is featured on our videotape when we're watching film as a team. To me, that's always more important. He does a lot of things well and he does them the right way. His best quality is that he plays with a calm and he gets the job done. He's so good at letting the game come to him.

I do believe you have to build a core to become a good basketball team. We're starting to get a core of guys. It would be nice to staple some of the guys' pictures on the wall instead of using the velcro.