Scott Skiles Hard Quotations

Jason Kidd is always capable of something like that on a given night, (Steve) Nash, too. But the opponent had so much to do with that night, that it's hard to envision.

I thought we played hard tonight. We kind of had a pop to our step most of the game. We made too many mistakes and missed too many shots.

We don't have the record in this building that we should have. We have talked about it many times. It is hard to figure.

Most games, when you have more field goals than your opponent, you win in our league. For us, most times, we haven't won. We just juggle players because of foul trouble too much, and we've had a hard time to stop it.

We played hard for the most part. We had a lot of good stretches. Then it came down to the end, could we make plays, and we did.

This would have been a real shame if somehow we would have lost it at the end after playing as hard as we played. In the first half we played really well, but we were tied. We came out and played hard and well and deserved to win.

We were very, very fortunate. Clearly, we were tired right from the beginning of the game. It wasn't a pretty game. We just played hard in the second half and really battled for it.

The stat sheet does not really show it, but they pretty much out-played us from beginning to end. We had a hard time in the early going even following our simple game plan. We tried different lineups to keep it close. In the third quarter, they took advantage of us and we could not do much to stop them.

Normally, I can watch a bunch of 9-year-olds play Little League baseball and spot the leader right away. It's not that hard to spot. People pretty much are who they are. But I've seen people make inroads in that regard, too, so I really don't know the answer to that.

We didn't handle it very well the last time we played them. We had a hard time reacting to it.

If you never done it the way Kirk does it, it's hard to explain how hard it is to chase some of the game's best players around two, three, four screens sometimes in the same possession and almost always taller than him, sometimes stronger also, so he does such a good job of it. I thought it wore him down a little bit, but he really responded late in the game. I thought overall it was (one) Kirk's better games.

He's setting off a chain of events that we're having a hard time dealing with.

The hard thing is trying to beat a team twice in a short period of time. It's always difficult.

It means the guys are working very hard at it and it's paying off. There's no magic in that, really. It's just that we have the a system that we teach, and the guys have spent the time getting it down. We've spent an awful lot of time on it.

Even when we got it close, Jamison got away from us. He's been a key guy whenever we've played against them. If we would've been able to do a good job on him and make him shoot a poor percentage, we've had some success. Arenas is normally going to have a pretty good game; it's hard to stop him. But Jamison got away from us.