Scott Skiles Team Quotations

Fouling him and putting him on the line makes him theoretically shoot less field goals and puts him on the line, but it also puts their team in the penalty earlier every quarter. And then other guys are going to the line. ... So if we're just fouling Shaq sort of indiscriminately, it can be a long night.

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.

We know the odds. Ninety-five percent of the time, the team that is up 2-0 wins the series. I imagine we're going to see the best Miami has on Sunday, and we'd better be ready for it.

We dug a 20-point hole against a good team at home. It's very difficult at that point to come back and win.

We were able to pick up a full game on the team right in front of us. I think it is important that the guys go home with a good game under their belt. Maybe we will have a little momentum coming out of the break.

Well, the team he went to is struggling mightily, I would say.

We kind of felt at halftime it was one of our poorer halves in quite a while. But it was a great second half for us. We were much more aggressive defensively and had at least 25 points off turnovers. It was a quality win against a team playing as well as anyone in the league right now.

We should have won that second game of the season at New Jersey (a 100-99 loss). It is nice to put one behind you against a team that has kind of dominated us.

We should have won that second game of the season at New Jersey. We missed a free throw and gave up a three-point play basically at the buzzer. It's a game we felt like we should have won. I guess it is nice to pull out a win against a team that's dominated us.

There is no question we have been fouling too much. We have silly fouls, but then I see the other team fouling like that and not being called. (Anthony) shot 21 free throws. He almost doubled our whole team.

We know we're not a title-contending team right now, but in the history of teams winning titles they tend to take their lumps for a little while before they finally get there.

I've said it many times, Kirk does so many things for our team that his shot-making is down the list.

I've never been part of a team where that didn't occur at some point. And sometimes behind the scenes is way worse than that.

They put together that team for this time of year.

This is a different team than last season. It's obvious that it is. I mean, we haven't had the same amount of fight that we had before. Unfortunately, too many times, when things have gotten a little bit tough, we've rolled over. It happened again tonight.

I made it very clear to him what my view was. We have more plays in our offense (for Ben) than any team has in their offense for any player in the league.

This is kind of a team that's been getting geared up for this time of year. Our guys have been able to hang with them, but this is going to be a different animal.

I didn't think either team was especially sharp tonight, to put it mildly. It was anybody's game for the taking. They turned it up a little bit and we weren't able to make any big plays to stay with them, we could have at any moment exerted ourselves we could have come back, we just couldn't do it.

Anybody that's involved in the league in depth and watches us play knows that we have more things in our offense for Ben probably than any other team in the league has for any other player. It's normally the guys who aren't playing well that are making those kinds of comments. So I don't put much stock in that.

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

That kind of team has given us problems. We're going to have to play much better than we played tonight.

That's something I really can't complain about all year. Our guys -- every day in practice, every game, even games when we don't look real smooth offensively -- we attempt to play unselfishly and share the ball. It's a fun team to coach in that regard; the guys are unselfish, and they like to pass the ball.

It's a 50-plus win team with two of the top 10 players in the league (O'Neal, Dwayne Wade). With Shaq, we'll try to collapse on him when he catches it and then make him play inside-out. With Dwayne, we'll just do our best to get help and make him play in a crowd.

They're a different team than when we saw them last time.

I don't know how satisfied you can be when we still have a losing record. We feel like we're definitely playing better. The reality is we're about to find out. Our toughest West Coast trip is normally the circus trip in November. This year, they're flip-flopped. We did well on the first West Coast trip 3-3. Now, this is a big one. All these teams Dallas, New Orleans, Phoenix, Utah, Denver, Sacramento and the Los Angeles Clippers are quality teams. Each team is really playing well. It's going to be a big challenge for us.