Hapless Pelicans ‘embarrassed’ by their ‘disgusting’ loss to the struggling Raptors
“If you’re not embarrassed and really mad about this, that’s a problem. It’s not really about the loss, (but) how we lost in front of our fans. Like, even the fans booing — I mean, what would you do if you was a fan paying your money? You want to come watch a competitive basketball game, especially from your home team. So, they got all the rights to say what they want, feel how they feel. They deserve a better game. “When you’ve got guys in, guys out, guys in, guys out, it’s really tough. But I think it’s not tough to compete. You can’t get punked. You can’t get pushed around. Tonight, it was just disgusting. We’ve got to compete. We’ve got to play harder, no matter who’s on the floor. As soon as we get on that plane, we got to lock in to understanding what just happened. You don’t want bad habits to carry over.”--New Orleans player Dejounte Murray.
The Raptors arrived in New Orleans last in the NBA in 3-pointerss made per game at 10.4. They proceeded to make a season-best 21 against the Pelicans.
“Either they got better overnight, or we’ve got to do a better job closing out and making it more difficult. It was a horrible showing. From top to bottom, we’ve all got to be better. ...just a bad game that we can’t have.”--New Orleans player CJ McCollum.
[Willie] Green, the Pelicans fourth-year coach, lamented what he called “a lack of competition.”
“We allowed a team to come on our home floor and really make us look soft,” Green said. “That’s what I told our group. That can’t happen.”
Anthony Edwards calls his struggling Timberwolves `soft’ and `just a bunch of little kids’
“I think it’s we soft as hell as a team, internally. Not to the other team, but internally, we soft. We can’t talk to each other. Just a bunch of little kids. Just like we playing with a bunch of little kids. Everybody, the whole team. We just can’t talk to each other. And we’ve got to figure it out, because we can’t go down this road. We look like frontrunners for sure tonight. We was down, nobody wanted to say nothing. We got up and everybody (was) cheering and (hyped up). We get down again and don’t nobody say nothing. That’s the definition of a frontrunner. We as a team, including myself, we all was frontrunners tonight. Everybody right now is on different agendas. I think that’s one of the main culprits of why we’re losing. I’m talking about the whole team. However many of us it is, all 15, we go into our own shell and we’re just growing away from each other. It’s obvious. We can see it. I can see it, the team can see it, the coaches can see it.”
So can the fans, who voiced their collective displeasure more than once Wednesday night.
