LAS VEGAS, August 27, 2007 — “Everybody’s waiting for you to fail, and we did do that last year,” U.S. assistant coach Mike D’Antoni said earlier Monday, referring to the team’s loss to Greece in the World Championships, where, as he noted, a couple bad quarters derailed its hopes of bringing home the gold medal.
Later in the night, D’Antoni and the rest of the coaching staff saw their team struggle for another couple quarters, before finally pulling away from the Mexican national team for the 127-100 victory in the teams’ opening game of the quarterfinal round.
“I think everybody was just a little stiff tonight,” Kobe Bryant assessed the team’s sluggishness. “We had a hard time getting loose, getting going. It took us a while to find a rhythm in our legs and once we did we were able to make a pretty good run at it.”
“I think it was us,” fellow starter, Carmelo Anthony agreed. “We came in, looked at the crowd – wasn’t nobody in the crowd. We didn’t have any energy. LeBron (James) came in at halftime and said, ‘Look, the energy man has woken up.’ We just tried to find a way to get some energy from somewhere tonight.”
Some of that stiffness and lack energy could have come from the face it was the team’s third game in as many days, including a hard fought win over Brazil only 24 hours before. The 12 players on the U.S. roster are accustomed to a back-to-back, at most, during the 82-game NBA season.
source : NBA.com
No comments:
Post a Comment