Rick Carlisle Hope Quotations

He tried it, but he was struggling to move out there. We'll hope he feels better Saturday (at Milwaukee).

Our foul trouble made it tough. (Bryant) gets you into foul trouble, and double-teams get other people open shots. We mixed a lot of different things and some were effective. Other times, you just have to hope he misses.

We had one of the best practices we've had in the 21/2 years I've been here. Guys really seemed committed to getting better. Little things like that are good signs. You hope it translates to the games, but you never know.

We have to hope Pollard is feeling better and we're going to have to depend on guys like David (Harrison) and Austin and Jeff (Foster) to pull through and we're going to have to find scoring as a team. Every team goes through their fair share of problems. We're just going to have to play through this.

We probably played 30 possessions of zone, which is more than we played all year. It gave us a chance to hang in the game because fouls were becoming a factor early. With zone, a little bit of it is luck and you have to hope they miss some shots. We were fortunate that they did with a lot of those possessions.

We're still doing a lot of things we wanted to do, but when you don't have three 7-footers out there to go through stuff, it makes it hard. We have to roll with it and hope we can get guys back as quickly as possibly but not rush them back.

There won't be any tough decisions when it comes to determining who to keep on the playoff roster. Our hope then is we can get back to 100 percent good health.

Injuries are going to happen. You don't have any control over it. We just have to hope long-range he's going to be OK. We've got to be ready to go the duration without him, from the sounds of it. So it's not an easy situation.

(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 certainly a step in the right direction. He continues to make gradual progress. We just hope things continue to get better.

It's a tough loss, but we fought back to give ourselves a chance at the end. Over a 48-minute game, you hope it doesn't come down to a last play. That last play didn't tell the story of the game.

It's a significant situation. It is day to day, but it's one of these things that's tough to gauge. We hope he feels good enough to play in Game 6, but I don't know; we'll have to wait and see.