NBA WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: SPURS v SUNS

May 26, 2005

Mike D'Antoni

COACH D'ANTONI: Well, the Joe (Johnson) update is pretty good. He played yesterday 2-on-2 today 5-on-5. Looks good. Pretty easy to say he will be important to us but he still has to clear tomorrow. He will see a doctor tomorrow, make sure everything is okay. Hopefully it is. He says he feels good. Don't foresee anything, hopefully he will be ready to go.

COACH D'ANTONI: Yeah, I don't see why not. If he's ready to go, he's playing at the level we need him to play at. He's an important part of the team. I have got more faith in him -- not more, as much faith in him as anybody. So, yeah, he will play.

COACH D'ANTONI: Well, biggest things that you can really rest Steve (Nash) a lot because he takes a lot of the play-making responsibilities off him, he's another guy that can break the defenses down. You know how important he was to us all year. I don't have to reiterate it again about what he means to us. He means a lot to us. Now, playing San Antonio at San Antonio, he's coming back from a little bit of a layoff. We will see how it goes, but we're real excited about having him back.

COACH D'ANTONI: No. No.

COACH D'ANTONI: Joe (Johnson) -- I am sure he's tired. I am sure he will be Saturday trying get in game shape. But Joe, expect him to play 45. So you are talking about a guy who can play 48 minutes without getting tired to, I would think, 30, 35 minutes he will be fine.

COACH D'ANTONI: Well, if it can be done, I think Joe is our best weapon against him. You are talking about Tony (Parker) who doesn't get slowed down much, so we'll see how it goes and Steve will be on him some. We'll have Joe (Johnson), different people on him, but again, it's just nice to have him coming back.

COACH D'ANTONI: I think everything. I think also that Joe (Johnson) is also someone who can create and create offense. Now you have Amare (Stoudemire) creating offense, Joe, just adds another piece of a guy who can break people down and that's going to help us.

COACH D'ANTONI: Yeah, we'll get back to the team that had the best record in the league and we're pretty happy about that. We know the hole we're in and we know how tough it's going to be, but then we're also a very confident team and we think we can go down there and give our best shot. We feel good about it. We just don't feel good about the last five minutes of the game so far. They have been the dominant team, the smart team and the team that's executed better in the last five minutes. We have to do a better job there with Joe (Johnson). We'll have pressure people in the last five minutes, so hopefully that all helps.

COACH D'ANTONI: The mood? Great. They think they can do it. Again, we know it's tough. We're playing a champion team with great players. But we think we can go in there and get one or two.

COACH D'ANTONI: Well, it's more -- the whole theme is we made some -- there were certain things that people do that you can't stop and we worry so much about them and even people analyzing the game go to that. Where we think we got beat because three or four times we really didn't run back hard and there was about four, five times we really didn't pursue the second rebound really hard. And we really didn't move the ball as well as we should and we caused six, eight turnovers the first quarter they got about 14 points on. Those are the things that we can correct. And if we correct them, then we think we have a heck of a lot better chance of winning.