HEAD COACH TERRY STOTTS “I really like the way we’re playing right now. Defensively, we’ve been really good the last two or three weeks. Our aggressiveness has been good, our alertness has been very good and I thought we did that for most of the night tonight. It’s good to go into the break on a win streak and playing well.” What did you like about Harkless tonight? “A little bit of everything. I liked his defense on Harden, he finished around the basket, he got rebounds, he ran the floor well. He did a little bit of everything in a kind of understated way.” On 31 points off turnovers tonight: “I like the fact that we’re doing it within the context of our defense rather than gambling and extending our defense. We’re being aggressive on the ball, we’re alert on the weak side, so I think those two things combined help create those turnovers.” Do you wish you could keep going with as well as you’re playing? “Well, we’re playing well and hopefully when we get back, we pick up where we left off but everybody could use a break.” Thoughts on Lillard passing Roy for 15th in scoring in Blazers history: “He’s been pretty good in a short amount of time. I mean, Brandon Roy, I wasn’t here for that, but I know what an imprint he made on the city and the franchise and how important he was to the Blazers. The fact that Damian has passed him this early in his career really says something because I know how good Brandon was, I know his career was cut short but everybody here holds him in high regard.”
DAMIAN LILLARD Assessing first half of season: “We dug ourselves a hole to start the season, giving up some games late, but we stuck with it, we kept going, we kept working. We didn’t get too high or low. We were able to close in and get to .500 going into the break. Our team has done a great job of sticking to the grind, working every day in practice and staying together. That’s gotten us to where we are now.” What would your reaction have been to being told you’d be 7th going into All Star break? “I would have been like, ‘That would be great.’ You have to give the credit all to the work that we put in. Our coaching staff, they do a great job every day. It’s hard to bring that energy and be on point every day and the coaches have been all year. They’re pulling guys aside, watching film, getting there early, guys getting shots in. They’ve just done a great job with the team and being patient. And our team, we’ve done a great job of being every day guys. It’s hard to get up and work every day before practice and the coaches constantly being on us about things that we don’t do well enough, it’s good to see us finally turning that corner. We’ve got to stick to that and just keep trying to get better.” On 31 points off turnovers tonight: “Any time you can do that, that means you’re active on defense, you’re playing pretty good and it’s an advantage because you’re taking away possessions from them and you’re capitalizing. Any time you could do that, you should be winning the game.” Thoughts on significance of passing Brandon Roy for 15th in Blazers scoring: “I mean, that’s an honor. Just to be moving up on that list period, but I mean, if Brandon Roy got to play as long as he should have played and people would have liked to have seen him play, I probably would never pass him, so it’s a great accomplishment, it’s an honor you know, but the more important thing is just continuing to be myself and continuing to win games.”
INTERIM HEAD COACH J.B. BICKERSTAFF On what went wrong: “We’re broken. It’s that simple. Right now we’re a broken team, and we all could use this break to figure out how we’re going to impact change. If we don’t want to impact change, we need to be made aware of that too and we’ll go in a different direction. But we can’t continue to go out and play this way. It’s easy to see. It’s a fragmented bunch. You can’t win that way.” On what he means by a ‘fragmented’ team: “Not on the same page. It’s however you want to say it. At the end of the day, we all want to win. We all say we want to win. We all say we’ll do whatever it takes to win. You got to walk that walk. If you’re going to do that, you got to go out and do it, and right now I think we’ve got guys that believe their competing, we got guys that are trying to get after it, but the train isn’t always moving in the same direction. So we got to fix it. It’s that simple. It’s our job. We’ll show up every day and we’ll work to fix it but we’ve got to fix it.” On how he need’s Daryl Morey to talk to the team: “It’s not Daryl’s responsibility. That’s the coaching staff’s responsibility and it’s the players’ responsibility. Daryl has brought the talent here. It’s not like it’s a lack of talent, so it’s not Daryl’s responsibility. It’s our responsibility as coaches and players.” On the comeback stretch: “I think it was better in that stretch. We were milking what was working, and in that situation, the train was headed in the right direction, and all five guys were on that train. So that’s where the problem comes in, is when, again, we’re going different directions. And it’s one of those things where the guys believe it’s the right thing to do. It’s not like their sabotaging one another, but their trying to do in their mind what it is they think it takes to win, but again, we got to do a better job of having a collective agenda and doing the same thing, and doing it together, and doing it correctly
JAMES HARDEN On how he feels: “It’s frustrating.” On what coach talked to the team about after the game: “That we look like we’re broken.” On what they will do as a team to regroup after the break: “Good question.” On how he is referring to the team as ‘broken’: “Just not willing to help each other out, that’s all it is. Everything, both ends of the floor. That’s what a team is.”
DWIGHT HOWARD On if the team feels ‘broken’: “We’ve got to figure it out, we’ve got to stop being so negative. We lose games and then we’re negative. We can’t be negative, there’s no way we’re going to succeed if all we do is stay negative and talk negative. So we’ve got to stay away from saying stuff like that.” On what is ‘broken’ about the team: “I’m not here to talk about what’s broken. That’s all we do is talk about the issues that we have, nobody’s being positive. You’ve got to stay positive still, we’ve got to speak positive life into ourselves. We can’t sit there and speak negativity every day because then all you’ve doing is putting negative thoughts in your head so when you get out of the game, that’s when it shows up. Negativity’s got to stop, no matter who says it. It’s got to stop, you got to be positive.” On what they are doing well as a team: “We got to figure something out but like I said, we’ve got to be positive. No matter what.”
