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NBA WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: NUGGETS v LAKERS

May 19, 2009

Phil Jackson

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Game One

Lakers Â– 105
Nuggets - 103

COACH JACKSON: I'll make a brief statement. We kind of won that game just on energy and gutting it out, finding a way to get some stops at the end and make some plays at the other end of the floor, some big ones. But I think they outplayed us and we won the game.

Q. You guys didn't get a lot inside; did they take that away from you, or did you guys just not get to it?
COACH JACKSON: They outmuscled us. They put pressure on the passers. They took the angles away from us. We had very limited post passes in this game, and as a result Pau had very few touches.

Q. Coach, in that final timeout, what did you say to your team to give them the push to overtake the Nuggets?
COACH JACKSON: Well, we're talking about getting this game close enough so that we could win at the end. And we had the momentum come back into our end of the court, what we wanted to run. And we needed to stop, we had to have a stop. We got a couple of the stops. Obviously Billups hit a 3 at the end. But we got a couple of stops that were very important for us.
And the offense didn't get decisive about what we were doing. We had some guys that looked indecisive out there which you gotta credit to their defense.

Q. You didn't give Kobe his normal rest. Was this one of those nights you knew you would have to lean on him?
COACH JACKSON: Yeah, he was just scoring opportunity for us tonight. Tonight we had very little else going on for us, and he muscled his way through that game.

Q. Can you talk about putting Ariza in late in the game and the play, where he intercepted the pass?
COACH JACKSON: Yeah, that was a substitution. We made it at the five-minute mark. They switched assignments on that. And he was playing Billups and Kobe was playing Carmelo at the end of the game.
The reason why he got the interception's probably because Carter had to make the pass over to Lamar, and the loop pass gave him an opportunity to speed into that ball, but that was a huge play for us.

Q. Kobe guarded Billups, guarded J.R. Smith and guarded Carmelo. Was he asking for that or were you just putting him where it was hottest?
COACH JACKSON: No, the assignment of taking Carmelo, he took on. When Trevor got in foul trouble in the second half, he took that on himself. But up until that time he was between Smith and Billups for most of the first half, in the first half of the third quarter.

Q. The Nuggets were very physical with your team. And it seemed like it was bothersome. I saw some of the things that we've seen in previous series that bothered your team. But they were able to fight through it. Can you talk about that aspect of fighting through it?
COACH JACKSON: I think that when we went in at halftime and we talked about our defense and what we were doing and how we were playing, we mentioned the fact that out of their 20 field goals, 19 of them were from the big guys. And it was just that they were so aggressive with our, at the offensive end, they were just going to take the ball right at us and we weren't making a stand.
I thought we did somewhat of a better job against them. But we're going to have to be much better in the interior part of our game than we did tonight.

Q. As the whistles were piling up, Trevor in foul trouble and Pau's in foul trouble, are you just trying to manage? How are you trying to manage the game to get everybody on the court at the end?
COACH JACKSON: Well, I knew that Drew was going to have a hard time tonight. We knew it was going to be a difficult game for him. That took our rotation away for our big guys, because a couple minutes here and a couple minutes there and he had five fouls. Trevor got himself in jeopardy a couple times, just didn't get himself in the right position and Carmelo was able to power through him.
But we like the matchup with Sasha on Smith, gave us some help. Our bench was good tonight defensively. This is the strength of Denver. We took that part of their game away from them. We just tried to manage Lamar, Pau and Drew for the most part in their foul situations that they got themselves in.

Q. It's almost a wash statistically between Billups and Fisher. And can you just talk about the boost in having Fisher making some shots, making some big plays out there performing?
COACH JACKSON: When Fisher went to the hoop near the basket and looked like he got fouled in the process, I think that contact got him back in the game and things started clicking for him after that. Shots looked okay. They just weren't going in until the last shot in the first half. We rely on him to be part of that, Kobe's outlet guy and a person that can make those kind of shots. He's a big person, big part of our offense.

Q. You mentioned Andrew's limited minutes because of foul trouble. Moving forward, how do you think that this matchup favors him? Was it just one game or --
COACH JACKSON: I think so. I think he'll adjust to it. I think Nene is a powerful, quick and active athlete. Drew just has to get another step quicker in the game and he's going to be fine.
We think that we can get the ball in to him and get some things accomplished. So this is a learning game for them. And here's a 21-year-old kid playing in the finals in the Western Conference. And I told him this is a great experience, learn from it and move forward.

Q. Tied score at 35 seconds left. Did you try to take the timeout to get 2-for-1 there?
COACH JACKSON: No. We had 24 seconds on the 24-second clock. We just wanted a action that we thought we could get a play from and we got it. That's what we needed.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach.

End of FastScripts

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