It's bad news that we had an opportunity to move up and didn't, but it's good news that everybody lost. Right now, that stuff isn't as important as how we're playing over a course of 48 minutes. We have to tighten some areas to give ourselves a chance to win against anybody.

We always knew he was a good all-around player. From afar, we always felt he would be a better individual defender than what he was given credit for just from watching him play against our team. He's a guy that always had pretty good rebounding numbers for a (small forward).

Things weren't looking great after the first quarter. But our guys hung in there and got two sub-20-point quarters, and that's tough against a team like Sacramento.

It's different, but he played college ball at Maryland in the ACC so he's very familiar with American basketball and he knows the NBA game because he studied it a lot and he's played against a lot of the players. The learning curve for him as a 29-year-old shouldn't be that great.

The last couple games we've gotten things back on track a little bit and we've got to keep going in that vein. We still are not in (the playoffs). We have a long way to go. We're going to have to win our way in because everybody else we're fighting against has got favorable schedules and are playing well.

You take away the first 20 games of their season and they have a very respectable record and they've beaten a lot of good teams. We struggle against them and we have to find a way to turn that around.

We're doing some things better, but we're not a perfect team. We have to do things a certain way and we have to be very precise at both ends of the court to give ourselves a chance to win against good teams, especially on the road.

He's experienced and has played him a lot. He's done well with him in the past and he's the best guy that we have. We're fortunate that he's feeling better for a game that we're playing against the biggest, strongest guy in the game.

How we play against Chicago will go a long way in showing what kind of character we have as a team. We've had two games now where we've had disappointing stretches. We're going to have be better than that to keep legitimate playoff hopes alive because we're in a tough stretch right now.