NBA WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: SPURS v SUNS

May 22, 2005

Gregg Popovich

COACH POPOVICH: Obviously, any win in the playoffs is a great feeling and we feel good about the win against a very good basketball team. I think that Tony, Manu and Timmy were all very good tonight and that allowed us to stay in the ballgame when things got a little dicey and they scored a gazillion points in the third quarter. But those guys kept everybody together and played very good basketball games. I thought all the role guys fit in pretty well so we're just thrilled with the victory

COACH POPOVICH: Brent making shots for us is huge because that's what has got to happen to make Timmy a better player. If they can go after Timmy the way they did and we're not going to make any shots we're going to have a problem and Brent Barry obviously has been a great shooter his whole career. He has been up and down for us this year but in the playoffs, he's been much better and played very confidently tonight. We gave him a little bit more time out on the court, usually players respond to that. He responded quite well.

COACH POPOVICH: I know it's likely that I wasn't there. (Laughs.) That's just a guess. I don't know that many plays. You got to score points to beat these guys because you are not going to keep -- you are not going to hold them to 82. Maybe somebody else is able to do that but we're not going to hold them to 85, 86 and 82, that sort of thing. It's not going to happen. You have to score some points. That's why we needed Tony and we needed Manu and Tim. If those guys come up empty or two of them come up empty, we'll have a big problem scoring on Tuesday.

COACH POPOVICH: Well, if that's what it takes, that's what we're going to have to do. We're a pretty flexible team going between big and small because we have done it against so many teams all year. [We Will|We'll] just -- we're willing to be the chameleon. We usually change according to what other people do. We don't try to impose our will too much. We try to see what is out there and do what we think we need to do against what we're seeing. That's usually how we play it.

COACH POPOVICH: Right. I was afraid it was going to stiffen up. Timmy obviously showed a lot of heart playing. He doesn't have his lift and you know, his ability to plant and pivot, those sorts of things, but there was no way that he was going to allow me to keep him out of the game. So we actually had to play him the minutes we played him because we thought it would be worse going the other way, so I will be very interested to see what it looks like tomorrow morning.

COACH POPOVICH: I am not sure exactly. There's only one ball out there and you know, somebody -- I mean, what did Stoudemire have, he must have had 40. Steve Nash scored, we stayed fairly locked up on perimeter players for most of the game. We kind of tried to not allow them to have as many these as they are used to. That's about all I can say. We're going to try to limit 3s. I think if you don't do that, it's a big problem with these guys. As is evidenced by the third quarter when Jackson, in transition I think he made, I don't remember, three, four where nobody was even near him. If they are allowed to do that you can't play with them.

COACH POPOVICH: In the second half we did it a little bit more.