What Steve Clifford Said Following the Loss to Houston

What went wrong

“In this league, you’ve got to have the right intensity, the right concentration for 48 minutes. It’s actually one of the things we’ve been good at. You have to be able to play well when the game’s not going well for your team or for you. That’s one of the things we’ve been good at. If you look at the number of times this year that we’ve been down 15, 16, 17, whether we’ve come back or not, we’ve been resilient that way. We weren’t tonight. We came out in the third quarter and they went 12-2, and I believe in the first seven possessions, we gave up three backdoor layups. The way we play, we should never, ever the whole year give up a backdoor layup, and we gave up three and we fouled on two of them. Again, we don’t have a lot of room for error. It entails a couple of things – we’re going to need our better guys, and it’s not fair really, but they’re going to have to play really well every night for us to win. We all have to do the team things, which we stopped doing. The first half, you’ve got to give it to those guys, we played great in the first half to have it at that score without Brandon (Miller) and ‘Melo (Ball) being able to play much. Those guys did a great job, but we flipped this script there when we started the third and we became just the opposite of what we had done in the first half.”

What Miles Bridges has meant to this team

“Miles is like 20.6 points per night. He’s super consistent, he plays every night, he plays huge minutes, he guards primary scorers. I mean, I’m not sure we can expect him to do a lot more than he’s doing. I think really what we need from him is what he’s been doing. There’s not many guys doing what he’s doing right now as an all-around game, plus he plays every possession. His energy level and just natural competitive spirit is through the roof. You have to be realistic, too. Look, those four guys are going to have to play pretty well every night, and then we have other guys who are capable of having enough so that we can win. We have to play smart and well with the right intensity and the right concentration.”

You can follow us for future coverage by liking us on Facebook & following us on X:

Facebook - All Hornets

X - @All_Hornets and Schuyler Callihan at @Callihan_.