Harris: "Our seeding won't change but we don't know who we're going to play (because other teams could move up or down). It could be any one of literally four teams. Because of the change (Avery Johnson taking over as head coach for Don Nelson), we're still trying to cement in our adjusted style. We're playing a little bit differently than we did prior to Avery taking over. We have not had two of our most important ingredients-our starting center, Erick Dampier, and our leading sixth man, Jerry Stackhouse-for over a month. Each of them is playing right now on about a 15 minute string, but we hope that sometime next week we can get them back in (for their regular minutes). Our final ten games will be used to really cement in our style. We won't worry about who we play until right at the end. We're probably not going to play (the first playoff game) until Sunday (April 24) and we'll find out who we play on Wednesday (April 20), so that gives us enough time to make those adjustments because we already know that whoever we play, we have a pretty good idea of their game because we have played them four times already. But this is a critical time for us and we have to make valuable use of the games and practices to integrate our new players into the adjusted style that we have."
Friedman: "Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki were such an incredible tandem when they played together. What do you think the reason is that now that they are on different teams they are both having career seasons?"
Harris: "In Steve's case he has a better group of players to fit his style, to run with him. We didn't have the same kind of athletes to run with him that Phoenix has. When you look at Stoudemire, Marion, Richardson, Johnson, this is like going to a race track. We had different kinds of players--we had very good players or we wouldn't have been winning 50-60 games during the years that he was here--but we didn't play that way and this (running style) really fits his game best. As for why Dirk is having a better season, in the past it was mainly Steve and Dirk working off each other and Finley fitting in there. We didn't have the overall team balance, so opponents could pretty well zero in on those three guys. Particularly if two of them were involved in a play action, they could load the defense in that direction. This year Mark Cuban and Donnie Nelson were able to bring nine new players into our mix and what we now have is a team that is so much more balanced that if you load up on Dirk we've got four or five other guys who can get 20 or 30 points on you. We didn't have that before."
