Scott Skiles Ball Quotations

This was a game that had a little bit of everything. I thought we showed a lot of fight and we made plays when we had to. They also made plays. Fortunately we had the ball for the last shot.

For whatever reason, we meant business when the ball went up tonight. That's the team I see in practice. It was good to see them take it into the game.

Well, you know, I know a lot of times people think it's easy to just get the ball to a guy when the other teams knows exactly where it's going. Sometimes it's not that easy. Our guys are still learning. They're getting better at recognizing a hot hand and getting him the ball, but we're clearly not a finished product. But we had a decent look at a three-pointer with 18 seconds to go. We had our chances.

Look, anytime you have a guy with that size that you can throw the ball to and he can get scores around the basket, you're going to miss that aspect of it. There are things that we don't miss, but that goes with every player.

Our guys always come back. But it was the second game in a row we weren't ready to play when the ball went up. We're still learning on the fly. We don't have guys with 30, 40, 60 games of playoff experience.

Our ball movement came to a screeching halt. Ben got hot for us early, and after that our ball movement just kind of stopped.

We came out at halftime totally casual. Just kind of winging the ball all over the place, acting as though they were going to give us the game. We've done this so many times now. The only word I can think of is unacceptable.

We'll go down there and try to get other guys the ball on the move, whereas Eddy could sort of overpower people sometimes. We may have to be a little more clever about how we're delivering the ball.

We have had several of those so far. We cannot have that. We are not good enough to play like that and win. We have to play inspired ball all the time, or this will happen to us.

We're waiting to award him the game ball when he does (take one).

We have to play inspired ball all the time.

We had good life from start to finish, and we played very good defense with the exception of a handful of possessions. That allowed us to get out and get our running game going, and get some good looks in transition; and we shot the ball well tonight.

We had a nice lead at halftime. Then we came out casual with the ball and sloppy with everything that we tried to run in the second half.

We did what we had to do. We came out and played with energy, I thought we had good ball movement. Our shot selection was excellent, and I think they were a little bit off.

We have to find other ways to use Tyson. The main thing is he has to find ways to stay on the floor by not fouling. We've got to get him the ball and ... let him do some different things.

At one point we had 11 field goals and eight of them were assisted. I thought our ball movement was good again, we played very unselfishly in general and we did what we had to do. We talked about trying to put them down early at least. It doesn't always work out the way you talk about it, but at least you get a nice lead and see how they react.

We shot the ball well enough to win. We just couldn't stop fouling.

The opportunities we had to see him play big minutes -- when Brad Miller went down, he was forced into the starting lineup with Sacramento -- he played well in that role. He knows and we know that's not a role he's necessarily comfortable in. But he's shown the ability to shoot the ball well. We weren't really sure what kind of a defender he was going to be. We've been pleasantly surprised with the way he's come in and picked up our concepts and things we're trying to execute.

(Brand) is clearly one of the top 10 players in the league, maybe the top five. I read early on that he said he is in much better shape this year and that has helped. He has shot the ball well from the perimeter. He is just having a fantastic season.

We didn't look right. Right from the jump ball we weren't aggressive defensively. Tonight we were a step slow and they made us pay for it.

We did a lot of good things tonight with the exception of four or five minutes with our defense breaking down. Other than that we had 40 plus minutes of pretty solid defense. We moved the ball well. We got a lot of open looks.

People think it's easy getting the ball to somebody, but it's not always that easy.

You still have to throw the ball into the low post, even if you feel like somebody may not be great down there,

I'm very happy about it. Our guys have done a great job of finding each other out there. We don't take many bad threes; most of them are off the ball movement. We've had games where we haven't made them as well, and we've still been able to win. But it's a nice weapon to have.

In the fourth quarter they turned it up right at the same time we started to turn the ball over. We kind of lost our poise out there and they ran away from us out there. That was it.

I'm really embarrassed by what happened out there. We played with very little heart and very little aggressiveness. We came out at halftime totally casual, just kind of winging the ball all over the place, acting like they were going to roll over and give us the game.

He's settled into the role of being one of the first players off the bench. He's shot the ball well for us. He's passed it. He's played very good defense. He's just a very good all-around player and is having a very good year for us.

You've got to be really skilled with the ball, you've got to be sharp with your spacing, you've got to use your ball fakes, and that's something we're still working on. They made it interesting for us.

That made it interesting. They came out in the third quarter and started getting after us, and we didn't handle that really well. But we were able to make our free throws and take care of the ball well enough to get the win.

It's baffling as much as we work on end-of-game situations that we just took the ball up and turned it over right there. I don't understand it.

We just waited too long to start playing. We kind of just sleepwalked through 2 1/2 quarters. Then near the end of the third quarter we finally started getting aggressive. We started driving the ball and our defense picked up.