HEAD COACH STAN VAN GUNDY
On the costly turnovers in the second half:
“We just have to get better with the ball. It has been a major problem for two years here now. We have some games where we take care of the ball. When we do, we play well and win. When we don’t, we struggle. A lot of that is just individual guys making better plays and being more solid with the ball. They were very physical tonight with a lot of grabbing and holding, and we’ve got to play a lot stronger.”
On what caused the defense to collapse at times:
“Well, they hit some threes, and that’s what happens when you haven’t been together a long time and don’t buy in. They hit some threes, so some guys didn’t pull in and take drives away. The thing is, it doesn’t help you to not pull in on the threes anyway because now the guy is downhill. It’s either a layup, or you come and help and allow them to kick it out and get corner threes. Obviously, we were at about 36 points-per-game in the paint through the first five (games), with 48 (points) and 50 (points) in the last two games. That’s the problem, and we’ll go back and look and see how many of those 19 threes came from the ball being down in the heart of the defense. We have got to keep the ball out of the paint.”
FORWARD ZION WILLIAMSON
On turnover issues:
“I think it’s we’re just not fully on the same page. They’re self-forced turnovers…like we’re forcing them on ourselves, and they’ll come with time. We’ll get better with time.”
On the rhythm on the offensive end:
“Honestly I don’t know if I can give a good answer on that because we’re only like five or six games in. I feel like you come back at game 12 and ask me that question, I’ll be able to give you a better answer. You can hold me to that.”
On the difficulty of the matchup tonight:
“Indiana is a great team. Hats off to them for getting the win tonight. For us, you know we’ll try to find a positive out of it. You know the positive of it is, like you said, they hit shots all over the place and they won off a big shot by Malcolm Brogdon. So the positive side of looking at that is that if we can stop some of those shots, we can get the win. So we’ve just got to keep improving on that.”
CENTER STEVEN ADAMS
On what Indiana did tonight to get such clean looks and why they were able to get into the heart of the defense so consistently:
“They’re a really good team. They move from side to side. Whenever you can shift the defense constantly, it leaves more room for mistakes. And it’s not even like a big mistake, but they do add up right from the start of the play. So you’re behind a step, then you move on to the other guy and he’s behind like a step and a half. That’s what they do really well…just constantly moving back and forth. So that’s how they’re able to get downhill. The guards were aggressive. The bigs were aggressive. So yeah…tough team, mate. It’s all good mate. We were right there, you know”
On if the turnovers are unforced errors or if they are occurring because of lack of offensive rhythm:
“All the above, mate. All the above. A lot of… there’s some that you could say that it is rhythm. Just gotta get used to what kind of passes are coming and then what type of passes are open. But yeah, it’s a two-man thing. It (isn’t) so much just on the passer, necessarily. It’s more on the dude receiving the pass mostly. So (we’ve) gotta figure that part out, which we will. It’s all good. Yeah we’re getting there. You’ve got to take some of these risks with these passes to just kind of figure each other out.”
