Rick Carlisle Ourselves Quotations

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.

I thought our guys showed a lot guts, hanging and finding a way to claw back in the game. Jermaine O'Neal was great and we had a lot of other guys who stepped up and played big. We had a chance, we gave ourselves a chance.

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.

We played hard for the most part, but that has to be a constant. We gave ourselves a chance to win, but had execution problems down the stretch. It's a game of inches for us right now and we have to be better.

We played hard for the most part. We have to do that on a consistent basis. We gave ourselves a chance, but we had some mistakes down the stretch with execution.

We dug ourselves into a hole and spent the rest of the game trying to dig ourselves out. We managed to give ourselves a chance in the second half, but the Wizards were able to put together a few scoring runs, and we couldn't stop them.

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.

We're doing some things better, but we're not a perfect team. We have to do things a certain way and we have to be very precise at both ends of the court to give ourselves a chance to win against good teams, especially on the road.

We're trying to hang in. We probably could have done a lot more things over the course of 48 minutes to put ourselves in a stronger position, but we didn't. We don't have much time to hang our heads about this. We've got another one tomorrow.

We competed hard from start to finish. It came down to Duncan making some tough shots. They hit that lucky 3 from the corner, which was a bad break for us. We hung in and played and gave ourselves a chance till the last minute. It's three losses in a row. There's no moral victories. You have to find a way to win games.

We know any win we can get is really critical, especially on the road. We have a very busy month in terms of frequency of games. We're going to have to continue to hang in and fight every night and give ourselves a chance. We're right in the midst of this thing. There's a lot that's going to be going on over the next 25-30 games. You're going to see a lot of jockeying and a lot of position changes.

They got into the paint time and time again in the third quarter, and that was the story of how the game went. . . . You give up 29 points in the third and that tells you the momentum of the game, because we had put ourselves in a strong position before that.

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 just too bad, because we really played hard for three quarters. The second quarter was really a disaster for us. It put us in a bad position at halftime, but we fought back and really put ourselves in a good position to win.

We hurt ourselves with a lot of little mistakes along the way, which put us in a bind. We've got to solve that. Otherwise we're always going to be a team teetering.

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.

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 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.

We just made some terrible errors down the stretch. They got going and then we compounded it with some defensive mistakes. We'll kick ourselves -- again.