Chauncey Billups
Chauncey Billups
Chauncey Ray Billupsis an American retired professional basketball player who played 17 seasons in the National Basketball Association. A star at the University of Colorado, he was selected third overall in the 1997 NBA draft by the Boston Celtics. A five-time NBA All-Star and a three-time All-NBA selection, Billups played for the Celtics, Toronto Raptors, Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, Detroit Pistons, New York Knicks, and Los Angeles Clippers during his NBA career. He won the NBA Finals MVP in 2004...
ProfessionBasketball Player
Date of Birth25 September 1976
CityDenver, CO
The nucleus is the same, but our bench is back. We're 12 deep and I don't think anybody else in the league can say that.
The bench was big, no doubt about it. All those guys played great tonight. We're going to need that from them in the playoffs.
I told Ben that I wished he had stayed in there. He's going to try to make those shots. We've got his back either way.
We've all got to get in there and help Ben. For so long here, we've kind of leaned on Ben and felt he was going to get every one of them. We've all got to make an effort.
Our focus today was to just come out and play our game and take what the defense gives us. I love when our bench gets the opportunity to play a lot of extended minutes. Whenever we get that opportunity, it's a big plus.
He's (Ben Wallace) the best in the business, man. He has more energy than anybody, he rebounds better than anybody, his defensive presence is unreal. He's just doing what he does. That's Ben Wallace.
We talked about it in the locker room before the game, that this was the game we needed. We felt they hadn't been tested in this postseason, they hadn't played against a team like us that plays defense, believes in itself and tries to control the tempo of the game. Yesterday was a good game to show them that.
We just want to get another win. We let one slip away down there, and we want to get it back.
We just wanted to go out there and protect our home court. We knew they played a tough game last night, so we wanted to jump on them early and take care of business.
We just stepped up to the challenge. I didn't ever think they were going to miss, and we couldn't hit anything, but we knew it was a matter of time. We're never out of a game, no matter what the score. You can't measure our pride. We just had to chase them off the 3-point line and start hitting some shots.
We just had a tough shooting night. We got all the shots that we wanted, but they just didn't go down.
We felt we had a chance to win this series, but nobody else felt that. We knew we were the only ones who believed in us.
We changed up our scheme a little bit defensively and made them take tougher shots. Once we made our adjustments and changed our scheme a little bit at halftime, we started hitting some shots as well, and our defense picked our offense up, too.
It would be nice if he was in here with us.