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
Nobody cares who gets the glory. We just care about winning and playing for each other, not anyone else.
I wanted to be aggressive early because the team gets better when I do that. The Mavericks and Phoenix are two teams that really try to jump on you early, so I wanted to be aggressive to keep them from getting on top of us.
Tay is their biggest problem playing against us. They put a big guy on him and his perimeter game is so good. They go small and he posts up. And he's not just a scorer, he makes plays down there and gets rebounds (eight Thursday). He's a match-up nightmare.
Watching him is unbelievable. His team's one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference, he gets the MVP of this game with all these great players. It's unbelievable. The kid is a freak of nature.
When he gets a tech, he always seems to be a little more in tune with what's going on. We ran his plays a little more after that, trying to keep him going.
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.
Rip was aggressive early. And once he got it cooking, we kept going to him and we fed off him. When he gets hot, I don't know anybody who can slow him down.
He gets twitching and being nervous. We're like, 'Man, relax, baby. Relax.' He's been like that forever.
He's one of the great ones, and the great ones make it easy for everybody. When he's rolling, everybody has easy shots and everybody gets the shots they want because they have to gear their defense to stopping him. They have to shift their whole focus.
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.