Avery Johnson: Within the flow of the game, I thought we took some pretty good threes. For us, our problem is defense. We’re not the same team defensively. We’ve got to get back and figure it out. Everything’s on the table right now in terms of trying to figure out how to get our team out of this defensive funk.
Deron Williams: In the second half, we weren’t able to get stops, so the pace slowed down and we couldn’t find our rhythm.
Joe Johnson: In the second half, we just didn’t have the same effort and intensity we needed defensively to get over the hump. We couldn’t come up with big stops, loose balls, and rebounds down the stretch to get some easy baskets.
Andray Blatche: When one thing goes bad, or two things go bad, it feels like our trust goes away a little bit. When five guys are on the court together, we all have to be together, vibe together.
Joe Johnson: They killed us on the glass (late). Got all the 50-50 balls.
Avery Johnson: It’s been a problem, guarding penetration. When you see a team that has 50 points in the paint… and it’s not even the 50 points, it’s the 50 attempts. We’ve got to do a better job of guarding penetration, of pick-and-roll coverage. We’ve got to get more blocked shots out of our big guys.
Deron Williams: If we’re playing good defense and are getting stops, we can win the game. I felt like we were doing that in the first quarter.
Avery Johnson: (In the 4th) the ball just kind of hit our hands and was coming off. We just didn’t execute. We can run a play, but we’ve got to execute. We’ve got to catch the ball, we’ve got to have on-time on-target passes. We’ve got to figure it out. I saw a couple of guys hanging their heads tonight. That’s not good, that’s not mental toughness. We’ve got to repair some things and we’ve got to figure out a way to get out of this losing streak.
Joe Johnson: (I) just wanted to take advantage (offensively). They had smaller guys on the perimeter, so we did a lot of posting up. Not just scoring the ball, but making plays if they brought the double.
Andray Blatche: We were trying to go into a pretty good pace ourselves. It wasn’t anything they did. We had a coupe mental breakdowns and they defended certain plays.
Avery Johnson: It’s a total team effort. Joe and Deron combined for 55 points, but that’s just not going to do it. We need Joe and Deron, we need Gerald, we need Hump, we need our bench, and our bench isn’t in a good rhythm. We haven’t made too many shots coming off the bench. There was a stretch in the beginning of the second quarter that we had too many turnovers. Again, we need to figure out, with Brook right now, our starting lineup. We need to analyze our rotations. We need more energy from our guys coming off the bench.
