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NBA WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: NUGGETS v LAKERS

May 23, 2009

Phil Jackson

DENVER, COLORADO: Game Three

Los Angeles Â– 103
Denver - 97

COACH JACKSON: Good effort tonight by Kobe and Trevor, Gasol chipped in. Solid basketball game. There was momentum down there on the stretch and outscored them in the fourth quarter, which is an important aspect of the game.
It was kind of a ragged game in many ways with inconsistency. Both teams fed into it, our shooting theirs 3-point shooting had trouble making 3-pointers tonight. But we had the ability to pull it out, Trevor made a big steal down at the end and it changed the complexity of that game.

Q. Just talk about Trevor and the ability he had with these steals, the playability.
COACH JACKSON: He has great acceleration. He can really make one step and be at full speed, it seems like. So those passes that are up for grabs, he's exceptional at it. And that's why he's one of the steal leaders in the league.

Q. Is your scouting report seeing anything in their inbounds plays?
COACH JACKSON: You have to give some credit to our -- a guy guarding a guy out of bounds because we do put some emphasis on that.
They gave us a lot of trouble inbounding balls and we were keeping the basketball, fortunately didn't lose it like they did. But really had to call another timeout, and Lamar did a good job trying to get them to lob the ball rather than make a direct pass.

Q. Would you say you met the Nuggets' physicality or maybe even surpassed it tonight?
COACH JACKSON: I don't know. Well, there's some technical fouls out there, but we'll have to sort that out through film study that we don't understand.
Those were physical, mostly physical actions or reactions. Maybe intercept a little bit on the boards. Tonight, again, that's another physical aspect of the game. Andersen was climbing all over the boards.
But I thought that we made the big plays down the stretch defensively with our big guys and that was important.

Q. How are you able to keep the game close so that you were able to get the big plays down the stretch?
COACH JACKSON: Somehow we hung in there. I think it's mostly due to their 3-point shooting, the inconsistency they had tonight with 3-point shooting and giving us the opportunity to stay in the ball game.
Our free-throw shooting was ragged. The opportunities there and the fastbreaks, they foiled those a couple times that were turnarounds. But we just made enough plays, and I think a lot of it was that we got their big guys in foul trouble tonight and were able to exploit that.

Q. Phil, way back here for the first nine quarters of this series, you guys had a ton of trouble stopping Carmelo. What changed today?
COACH JACKSON: I'm not sure. I'm going to have to look at that on tape. He took a couple of jump shots that were contested. He had I thought a pretty good first half. The second half he didn't play a lot because of foul trouble, but I think our identification was better on what he was going to, on picks he was going to be coming off, where he wanted the ball, some of those things were much better tonight.

Q. Phil, Nuggets were 0-for-9 start of the fourth quarter. Did you make any adjustments going into that quarter defensively?
COACH JACKSON: You know, we really didn't. We just said we gotta -- now is the time. We came back in and got down 7, came back into that with the start of a free throw at the beginning of that technical free throw at the beginning of that quarter, because that 3-pointer at the end of the third quarter really set us back again.
And, yeah, I think it kind of changed the momentum a little bit for us. Gave us an opportunity and then we capitalized on the fact Billups was -- he was in but he was out and that helped us in those situations to kind of gain control.

Q. Speaking about momentum, the start of the first quarter, the start of the second half, came out with enough energy and kind of never really let the crowd get into it, seemed whenever the team went on a run you were there right with a run on your own?
COACH JACKSON: Pretty much. I would agree with you. I thought Andersen had some big plays in the first half, though, that really ignited the crowd, some dunks and some put-backs, and he was a big factor for them, I thought got them going in the first half. In the second half I thought we did a better job maintaining that control.

End of FastScripts

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