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
We knew that they would come in fighting. We had control of it, but we kind of let up a little bit in the fourth quarter and they brought it back, but we pretty much controlled the game.
He had a tough night against us last time, but he was having a tough night against us in Miami, too, before he got going in that fourth quarter. It is what it is. I'm looking forward to it, though. It's always nice to play them.
We're just an entirely different team in the fourth quarter. We're so mentally tough and we've seen every different situation so many times that when we face something, we know which way to attack it.
We came into this game really focused on what we needed to do, making some adjustments. That team just fought. They just fought. You have to give them a lot of credit, but come fourth quarter . . . we just had to grind it out.
I just put them on my back and took them to the fourth quarter, ... Then the other guys took over for me.
It helped us tremendously. That first game back from a West Coast trip is always difficult to get back into the swing of things and get adjusted to the time zone and all of that. Without that, you don't see us score 38 points in the fourth quarter.
Once we got to that fourth quarter, we just decided we were going to have to grind it out. We've been through this before, man. We know how to handle these situations.
The fourth quarter was kind of fun. It was a shootout.
When you have to take the ball out, you can't run. This last couple of weeks our defense hasn't been the same. When you have to take that ball out, you can't get transition baskets.
We love playing on the road. We love the idea of 14, 15, 18,000 people all being against you and being able to quiet the crowd. We love that. We feed off that.
We're never out of the game. You can just never measure pride. We're never out of the game, no matter what the score looks like. Tonight was a great example of that.
We knew it was going to take time to mesh. We're starting to get our swagger back.
We're not into it. Because we know once we do get into it, it's a long grind. We've played until June the last two years, and that's long. That's three months. When it's time, we'll be ready.
We got longer, younger and more athletic. This year we played a little more up-tempo than we did last year.