NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: PISTONS v HEAT

May 30, 2005

Rasual Butler

Damon Jones

RASUAL BUTLER: What I try to do is, you know, I give myself -- I pray every day to the Ultimate to lead some confidence in my abilities. I have my little routine over there, I go through my warm-up and put some heat packs over there and try to keep my legs warm and get my body sweating a little bit so it won't take me as long to loosen up once I get in the game.

RASUAL BUTLER: After warming up, yeah.

DAMON JONES: Well, Chauncey is a fiery competitor. In a game like that at this point in the season, sometimes emotions are going to play a big part. I don't think he was off his game. He came out and he had a decent game offensively, but him getting a technical, you know, I smile at that because we get one free throw, a chance to get another point.

DAMON JONES: I don't know what to say about that situation. They can say they melted down, but we feel that we did some pretty good things. Hindsight is 20/20, so hopefully we can get the same effort that we got in Game 3 and do the same things down the stretch to get another victory.

DAMON JONES: I think at any point in time they're dangerous, whether their back is against the wall or the series is tied. We take the same approach. They understand they're a good basketball team, they do a lot of great things on both ends of the floor. But we've shown that when we're on our game plan and we're playing with the type of energy and effort for 48 minutes, that wherever they go, whether it's home game or on the road, we're going to be a tough time to beat.

DAMON JONES: I think it's going to be imperative that we come out and do what we did similar to last night and keep the game close at the beginning, try to take the crowd out of the game. We saw when they made their run there in the third quarter after being up ten that the crowd was into it and they sort of fed off the crowd, so we want to try to take those guys out of the game as soon as possible.