Kyle Lowry, Danny Green, Nick Nurse and Pascal Siakam spoke to the media Monday ahead of Tuesday’s Game 2. Here are some select quotes.
Kyle Lowry on scoring zero points:
I’m a guy that plays basketball the right way. Not scoring any points doesn’t mean I didn’t affect the game so that’s why you know the mental game doesn’t really matter. For me I played the game the right way, I missed some shots and we lost, so it looks worse.
Kyle Lowry on Orlando’s defensive strategy:
Everybody’s in the paint. They’re really strong loaded team, they were aggressive on the side a little bit, soft on the top but they’re four guys, five guys in the paint at a time and that’s what he’s been doing, Charlotte and even before that, and now with Orlando – there are four guys in the paint, eight feet in the paint for them.
Danny Green on slowing down DJ Augustin:
Just try to slow him down. I’ll use my length to my advantage, make it tougher for him. Try to get him to slow the offense down so I pick him up a little bit full-court, try to slow the offense down a little but I don’t think they run a really fast offense. But, just bother him a little bit, tire him out. They didn’t go deep in rotation but we didn’t go very deep either. I think we got a little gassed as well.
Nick Nurse on the charge/foul calls and trying to get to the line::
I thought we did a decent job of trying to put our head down and go through them a little bit and try to get to the line alright for the most part. They were all charging foul. I mean it was four charges in one quarter and they were all on us…we were playing great dominating so I don’t know, we just gotta keep going.
Nick Nurse on managing Kyle Lowry:
I’ve met with him and talked with him about it and the main thing that I say going into the thing was that we need you to be our leader and be tough. You need to run the team, be tough, do what you do instinctively. I got to take some responsibility for this myself, too, I thought we had Kyle in a really good place the last half of the season, he was playing well, feeling good etc., and obviously he wasn’t in a good enough place to impact the game on the scoreboard the other night. So I got to do everything I can do to help him succeed and and we’re gonna do that.
Nick Nurse on things that went wrong defensively:
Three things actually: we didn’t guard the ball well enough, when we didn’t guard the ball well enough, we didn’t have our second line of help in position and then we did a poor job of executing some of the game plan portions. Just too many strange things that I almost can’t explain: somebody would leave a guy and all of a sudden he was standing there wide open, and those things can’t happen.
Nick Nurse on defending Orlando’s backcourt:
I think you’ll see everybody getting put on both of those matchups. It’s kind of the Augustine/Fournier/Ross combination and I see I think you’ll see all the way down to Kawhi, Danny, Norman and Fred all involved in those things depending on the situation.
Pascal Siakam on what he can improve from Game 1:
I think for me just trying to be more aggressive and patient. I kind of rushed a little bit every time we play them and I mean it’s playoff and you look at every single detail, use whatever you know. I’m just trying to learn and see different things. I don’t think I did a great job. There’s still things that I feel I can [improve], definitely attack better and just be more patient and understanding of what they’re doing.
Pascal Siakam on getting beat and learning from it:
I think that was good for us to get beat and just understand that this is playoff time and it’s not gonna be easy. All the teams are coming to beat us and we just gotta bring that same energy that we did in the third quarter defensively. And just have that mindset that you’re not gonna let them score on you, like we got to have that mindset.
