Rick Carlisle Tonight Quotations

Jack is such an important guy on our team. Our players view him as one of our leaders. You have to have your top players involved and playing at a high level. I thought tonight Jack understood the defensive end was going to be what was going to win the game for us.

Our undoing tonight was the second quarter. In the playoffs you've got to play a full 48 minutes. We're still working on it. We've got a ways to go.

Our start to the game was OK. But the second quarter, they had 32 (points) and we couldn't keep them under 30 after that. They played great offensively. During this 15-game period, we've competed hard on a consistent basis and tonight we had a letdown from that.

I wasn't convinced that there was any way Steve Jackson could play tonight after the fall he took on Wednesday. I went and saw him at the hospital after the game and he was in a lot of pain.

We have the same group that played well and won the other night. We're not going to make excuses. Our undoing tonight was the first quarter when we allowed them to shoot over 77 percent. That got them going early.

We set a great tone early with a great defensive effort, and that sort of carried the day as far as the game went. Tonight we did a lot of things well and I thought we got better as a team, so that's a good sign.

Balance has to be one of the things that carries us. Everybody that played, played hard. We're not necessarily doing everything right, but tonight we did things really hard.

It was clear that having him out there tonight would be the wrong thing to do. He just wasn't able to cut on it and move the way he needs to.