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NBA WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: SUNS v LAKERS

May 19, 2010

Phil Jackson

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Game Two

Lakers: 124
Suns: 112

COACH JACKSON: That was a good way to finish a ball game for us. We had a tough quarter, and the second and third quarters they got their offensive machine rolling out there. And we had to find a way to kind of buckle down and get our game going for us in the fourth quarter.

Q. Coach, can you talk about the small lineup that the Suns seemed to have a lot of success with in that third quarter, fourth quarter, early fourth quarter?
COACH JACKSON: Yes.

Q. And some of that was facilitated by Andrew having his, getting into foul trouble. Would that be normally a counter to that?
COACH JACKSON: You know, I think it was a sign of what they want to do to spread our defense out. You know, activate their 3-point shooters, make us have to cover screen roll offense, which they ran consecutive at times.
And then find the open man outside of that sequence of action, which happened to be Grant Hill most of the time in that third quarter.

Q. I was wondering, when you go to Phoenix, are you going to be at all concerned about trying to control the pace there or just let the game flow and see how it goes?
COACH JACKSON: We've been able to play both styles of basketball as a team for the last two or three years. We like the pace. We like to control the pace. But we feel comfortable, if it's an accelerated pace.
This team, the Suns, have a real good feel for that pace that they play inside of the first 10 seconds of the 24-second clock. That's where we have to kind of figure out how often we want to run. I thought the second quarter we started running too quickly and got them playing their pace and a little bit accelerated for ours.

Q. Pau said that down the stretch he thought that the Suns defense looked frustrated and confused, didn't know what they were doing. Was there something you were doing different to get the ball inside to him so easily?
COACH JACKSON: We kind of lost our way in this third quarter. We ran a sequence of screen rolls and really didn't get the ball inside, post the ball well. They found the post. Did a good job the first half of denying the entry passes.
We were successful, we got the ball in, but we made a concerted effort in the fourth quarter to get that ball back inside, and work our offense inside out instead of from the outside.

Q. Did you hold up Bynum because he got the fourth foul or because you wanted to conserve his knee injury, so to speak?
COACH JACKSON: I thought he played a game for us tonight that we liked. I mean, he did some things that were really good for us offense, we got rebounds. When they went to their screen roll offense, that's when we had to accelerate the pace a little bit and use more mobile players on the outside. I think that's a little tough for Drew to cover right now.

Q. Kobe, you sat Kobe in the fourth a few minutes in, Dudley hit another 3. And the team seemed a little ragged and taking Kobe out it seemed to settle things down, when he came back the run continued. What was the thinking there with Kobe?
COACH JACKSON: I felt like he might have been tired. We had been pressed hard a little bit right at the time. And it was time to give him just a rest to clear himself, get himself a second wind and come back and finish the game off. It worked out well for us.

Q. You said yesterday that it's going to be a game-by-game basis assessing Ron's shooting. He had another pretty good night?
COACH JACKSON: Yes, he did.

Q. Have you seen that in practice? Like I asked yesterday, has he turned a corner there?
COACH JACKSON: Well, we really haven't had an opportunity to practice, obviously, with just a day off in between games. But he's been working on it. You know, he's taking the shots that are there. He's bailed us out on a number of shots tonight I thought he played a great first half for us.

Q. Is there any concerted effort at all to try to isolate or punish Stoudemire defensively, found a lot of ways to attack him tonight?
COACH JACKSON: He did get in foul trouble. He's the initiator of that screen roll offense because of what he can do with his offense roll activity, when Nash brings the ball off him. So there's obviously -- we'd like to see him sit more minutes in the game than he is, playing a 40-minute game.
So, yes, we took the ball down low post at the end of the game because he had five fouls on him, and we knew it would be tough for him to play defense at that time.

Q. You guys are in these two games so far. You're averaging 126 points and I think you're shooting something like 56 percent. What do you attribute that to?
COACH JACKSON: Well, I think we found a number of ways to score. Obviously this team, the Suns have played really good defense in the two series before ours, we anticipated, we thought about moving the ball about finding the open man in situations. Kobe's played well. Tonight he didn't shoot the ball as well as he has. But other guys stepped up and shot the ball really well.
And I thought we had some second-chance opportunities that helped us out. We had some runs that helped us out. Our bench has played well coming off the bench and giving us a bump off the bench.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach.

End of FastScripts

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