"It's not so much that we beat Oklahoma, but how we did it," said Bryant, who shook off his own woeful shooting game with two key 3-pointers late in regulation. "In the playoffs, particularly if you don't have home-court advantage, you're going to have games like this. We have to have the poise and the confidence to just keep chipping away."
"I got real emotional and excited, and it was unfortunate that James had to get hit with the unintentional elbow," said World Peace, who had scored 12 points and played solid defense on Durant. "I hope he's OK. Oklahoma, they're playing for a championship this year. I apologize to the Thunder and James Harden. It was just unfortunate."
Later, World Peace took to Twitter to share his thoughts and expressed remorse over the incident.
"I just watched the replay again..... Oooo.. My celebration of the dunk really was too much... Didn't even see James ..... Omg... Looks bad," World Peace tweeted.
"I can't speculate (how many games)," Bryant said. "I'm sure he'll have some type of a suspension. And James, I hope he's OK. I haven't heard anything about how he's doing, but he's one of my favorite players in the league, one of my young boys, so I hope he's doing all right."
"I'm just happy my teammate is all right," said Durant, who scored 35 points on 11-for-34 shooting. "It was a bad play. Hopefully Ron didn't do it intentionally or have any malicious intentions on that. We've got to move past that."
"Being down double digits against a very good team, we could have folded easily," Lakers coach Mike Brown said. "This might have been our best team win of the year."
"I believe in Kevin, I believe in Russell, I believe in what our guys do," Thunder coach Scott Brooks said. "Some nights they're not going to fall for you, but if the execution is good and the shots are good, you have to live with the results."
"It's very humbling, honestly," James said. "The fans have been amazing this year and they're going to continue to be amazing going into the postseason. ... It's humbling."
"I think LeBron is having a historic season," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said.
"We had chances," Rockets coach Kevin McHale said. "The game was kind of in the balance at 83-all. They got some separation. LeBron is a hell of a player." "Failure is a horrible word, I don't like it and I don't consider it a failure," Scola said. "Our goal was to make the playoffs and we are hurt because we couldn't qualify. But a failure? No, I don't see it that way."
"Fortunately, I hit shots," Parsons said. "My teammates got me open. I just hate losing so at the end it doesn't matter how well I played. A loss is a loss."
"It was great," Parsons said. "I had a lot of family and friends here. You always want to play well for them but at the end of the day you want to get the win. It was a good learning experience and it's exciting to be back in Florida."
"Those are the kind of wins that coaches like, when there's segments of the game where it's just tough and ugly," Spoelstra said. "We went through a few spells offensively where the ball was just not going in and we stayed in it mentally."
"No contact at all. It was a great battle," Stoudemire said. "It was a phenomenal game. From what coach Woody's (Mike Woodson) saying, the way to win a championship is defense and rebounding."
"It's frustrating that we're still playing for something and defensively we were non-existent," Johnson said. "There was no help (on defense). If you were guarding somebody 1-on-1, you were definitely guarding 1-on-1."
"It shows how valuable Tyson Chandler is to our ballclub," Woodson said. "He plugs a lot of holes for us. It's fun for fans, but we have to defend better.
"I felt like I got fouled at the end," Williams said, "but they didn't call it."
"Down the stretch, I just figure you got to put the ball in the hands of your playmakers," Williams said. "The Knicks did it all game. Melo shot 32 times. They got the ball to the right man."
"Obviously all game was pretty much an ugly game," Gordon said. "We just stuck it out and tried to be more persistent than they were."
"LK had a great look at the end of the game and that's all we can ask for," said Raptors coach Dwane Casey, who did not play DeRozan in the final quarter to give a handful of other players more minutes as his team plays out the final games of the season.
"Both teams obviously are in very similar situations," Casey said. "Almost identical records, both not going to the playoffs.
"Those games go either one of two ways: Either 130-126 or it's this."
Kings 114, Bobcats 98. "We did a good job getting to the hole," Cousins said. "They didn't have a lot of size and we took advantage of it."
"It's difficult," Silas said. "We only have three big men (because of injuries) and it's been hard on these guys to keep going. That's basically all we have. When a team comes like they have with big guys and they're banging, it is hard."
"When he is in an aggressive mode, there are very few people who can keep him in front," Kings coach Keith Smart said. "And then if he doesn't look to attack, he gets his teammates involved. I'm trying to grow him into a new position and he's still going to have the ball in his hands 60 percent of the time. It's only going to help him. It's going to bring his whole game and career on top to where he wants it to be."
"The biggest thing now is having some pride as men," said Bobcats forward Tyrus Thomas. "Not so much as basketball players. We've got to fight it out every second until the horn blows."
"When we flew in last night, we knew a fast start was something we needed to do," Smart said. "I thought we had the right energy from our starting lineup. We got off to the great start that we needed and we sustained it through the half. We were a little lethargic to start the second half, but I kept the starters out too long because the other guys were playing well. But they regrouped and got it back together."
"Jenkins is a tough New York City kid," said Warriors coach Mark Jackson, a Big Apple point guard himself back in the day. "A tough, hard-nosed kid who has no quit. Totally competes, gets after it. He was banged up, bruised up, battered up, but found a way to gut out a big-time performance."
"We've got problems here," said Barea, who shot 5 of 18. "We've got a lot of guys that don't care. ... We're just going to keep getting Ls until we get players here that care, that care about winning, care about the team and care about the fans."
"Until you point those guys out one by one, it doesn't really matter," said forward Michael Beasley, who scored eight points on 3-for-11 shooting and had nine rebounds. "That was a collective loss."
"Coach kept telling me to stay aggressive," Jenkins said. "The more the shots started to fall, the more confident I got in taking them. Everything just worked out."
"There's some guys in here that have been more worried about other things," Wolves forward Anthony Tolliver said. "It's not that they don't want to win, it's just sometimes the team concept goes out the window. Whenever you're struggling a lot of times people want to blame somebody else, but the biggest thing is people have to look in the mirror, plain and simple.
"The hardest thing to do is to say, `My fault. It's on me.' It's real easy to say `You should've done (this) or you should've done that."
"We want to clinch as soon as possible," Ginobili said. "Tomorrow we have a good game here, so we're going to be trying to play our best and keep improving. We have room for improvement, where we can pick up the aggressiveness. We want to try and set the pace for the playoffs.
"I thought it was a relatively sloppy game, but we managed to keep our lead," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. "Sometimes in the NBA that's hard to do. We stuck with it and got the win."
"Any time we get a chance to rest Tim and Tony doesn't play that much, and we get away with a win, that's always a plus," Jackson said. "As long as we take care of business and continue to build and not take steps back, we'll be all right."
"For sure, I'm feeling better than a month ago," Ginobili said. "That's promising, and that makes me feel good and in a better mood."
"I feel like we're getting better every game and we're becoming a solid team to where we can play people who don't play so we can give our people a rest for the next game," said McGee, who came off the bench to become the 10th different Nuggets player to lead or share the team lead in scoring.
"We didn't do our defensive assignments," the Magic's Jason Richardson said after Orlando was beaten repeatedly on lob passes inside to McGee and Denver's other big men. "We didn't have energy. We didn't do anything how we've been playing the past five or six games."
"Some of those dunks were pretty important," Nuggets coach George Karl said. "The game was not over when he made a couple of those dunks against the zone."
"I don't think it had anything to do with running out of gas," Van Gundy said. "Four times a guy's going to start up to set a pick and back cut for a lob? It's absurd. We ran out of focus, we ran out of competitiveness. That's what we ran out of."
"It was a lot of fun," said McGee, who also had eight rebounds and three blocked shots. "We passed the ball and we were playing great defense. Things were just getting open for us."
"We needed this game a lot more than they did," Mo Williams said. "We want to get the home-court advantage. It's very important to us."
"We got to keep fighting," Paul said. "We got to win one more to lock up home court."
"I'm way past the trade," Gordon said. "It was a good experience coming back here and playing in front of the fans. I played here for three years and had good years here.
"I thought some of the calls just didn't go our way and our guys didn't give into that. It's hard to play against all the flopping and nonsense that goes on with that team," he said.
"Who is the common denominator with all this fluff going on around the league? Blake Griffin. We don't dunk, we don't stare at people, we play the game the same way every night. ... But all the extra stuff, we've never been about that."
"The last eight minutes turned it up on the defensive end, we got stops and we were able to get out in transition," Paul said. "Our bench came in and was huge."
"It was more the way I was playing defense," Foye said. "E.G. is a tough cover. I was just locked in. I always shot the 3 ball pretty well, but not like this."
"I don't think we played very well," Del Negro said. "Our effort, our energy, our attitude and our intensity were not good for about 40 minutes and then in the last eight minutes or so Reggie Evans came in and gave us a huge boost. We were able to gut it out."
"Reggie is a tough guy, I turned around and he hit me hard," Vasquez said. "I was like 'Come on, man.' But it's nothing personal."
Williams said, "They put Reggie Evans in the game for one reason, and that's to come in and hit people. It's hard to play against that. I'm not going to retract that. That's what happened."
Credit: ESPN
Copyright by STATS LLC and The Associated Press
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