<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">INDIANAPOLIS -- Jermaine O'Neal has been pretty good about watching what he says to the media. He has always been careful to praise the Pistons and not offer any excuses. But he might have slipped up just a little after Game 3. Talking about how the Pistons have defended him, he told Peter Vecsey of the New York Post, "Rasheed (Wallace)'s length enables him to get a hand in my face when I shoot jumpers. I'm bigger than him. I've got to take him down low and use my body to my advantage. Ben (Wallace) is stronger but smaller than Rasheed. He's really not that good defensively one-on-one." When told of O'Neal's comments before the game, Ben Wallace looked down and shook his head. "Another case of less talking and more playing," he was asked. "Yep," he said. Wallace and Wallace managed to subdue O'Neal for the second straight game -- limiting him to 10 points (4-for-15 shooting). In the last two games, he has made just 6 of 26 shots. "I thought the biggest impact that Rasheed had was his defense," Pistons coach Larry Brown said. "He rebounded. He contested shots. He blocked shots. He's as good a defender as I've coached." When Rasheed Wallace wasn't badgering O'Neal, Ben Wallace was. "Ben was doing a good job keeping (O'Neal) out and make him shoot fadeaways," Tayshaun Prince said. "Then when he did get into the paint, our team defense was great. We made it real tough for him." O'Neal didn't necessarily see it that way. "I thought we had a lot of good looks," he said. "We just weren't able to make the shots we had." Coach Rick Carlisle suggested that O'Neal's shoulder was still ailing him, but O'Neal quickly shot down that theory. "I feel good," he said. "I played bad. I was terrible tonight. There are never excuses. I was out there. I played. I stunk the gym up. I was terrible. I couldn't do anything right." O'Neal is averaging 15.5 points against the Pistons, which has been his playoff average through 11 games. He is shooting just 34 percent. "It is a cycle in basketball," he said. "It always comes back to you. I'm a true believer that you should never get too high and never get too low. It just didn't happen for me tonight. "But I can't fathom the thought of it continuing to happen in this series. At some point it's going to come back to me and come back to me in a big way." </div> Source
It doesn't seem that JO was neccessarily making excuses, he was just pointing out how the Pistons were able to defend him. It's more like he is telling himself what he has to do in order to score more and be more effective. Just another case of the media making something out of nothing.
Rasheed Wallace is an underrated defender. The guy was swarming O'Neal and didn't give any space to breath.
The Pistons defense isn't doing much, Jermaine is just an awful decision maker and is always forcing up shots when he has none. The Pistons defense gets credit but they owe it to Jermaine for being so dumb to force up those terrible shots that he always does. For those who thinks it's the Pistons defense, just look at JON's FG% in the playoffs: 1st Round: 35% 2nd Round: 32% As long as you force up bad shots and you don't have "Jordan" and "23" on the back of your jersey, you'll never shoot a high %.
