I told Ben after, I had been in the Western Conference for a lot of years and I have coached against Dirk many times. I don't think I had seen as good a job of playing a guy one-on-one as that. Dirk made some shots, but he really had to work. We wanted to make him a volume scorer, and 25 points on 23 shots, that's pretty good.

We said going in the idea was to not get anybody hurt and make sure that the guys we had to play broke a sweat and didn't get too stale and give our young guys an opportunity to play in a heated situation against some top players.

The thing is -- like it or not -- a lot of teams don't prepare much to play against zones, ... They don't have as expansive an offense as they do for man-to-man.

We've played 37 games and different guys lead us over different parts of the game and play unselfish...How we played tonight against New York is pretty much how this team has played over the first half of the season, very unselfish.

You're in a situation where the other team doesn't have anything to lose. Their backs are against the wall, and they're going to come out and play with a great amount of energy. They're going to play with confidence from the way they've played their last couple games. You know going in about that situation, so you know you have to go in and have a superior performance. You can't just come out and have an average performance.

Our main guys played really well in the third quarter. Then we gave our young guys some fourth quarter experience against a team trying to get a win after losing 10 straight. It would have been better if they would have got the win but overall they did some good things and got some good experience in a close game.

You never want to have a player that has so much confidence against you that he thinks he can just take the game over at any time. At least he's not going to think he can walk on the floor and score 17 straight on us.

Tonight, it didn't matter if he had 50, 40, 20 or 10. The idea was for us to win. It wasn't Kobe Bryant against us. It was the Lakers against Detroit.

They're trying to find out who they are. I think everyone who is playing against them is trying to find out who they are a little bit, too.