Minnesota Timberwolves vs. Oklahoma City– Jan. 27, 2016
ThunderHead Coach Billy Donovan
On the win and road trip…
“I was really proud of our guys this road trip. We obviously had to battle a lot of different things. We dealt with Steven getting hurt and having to sit out, and then Andre having to go down. I mean, two really good defensive players. Coming in tonight, Cameron had some concussion-like symptoms. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, probably will find out more tomorrow. We had a group of guys that logged a lot of minutes yesterday. I thought we had great bench production today. I thought Anthony Morrow gave us a good lift, D.J. Augustin gave us a good lift. Nick (Collison) did, Kyle (Singler) did. Enes (Kanter) I thought coming off the bench played very, very well. We battled foul trouble. And certainly the defensive numbers, I think some of it can contribute to the end of a long four-day trip, but I really thought our guys gave great effort considering the fact that it’s a tough turnaround coming out of yesterday’s overtime game in New York, getting in at 3:30 in the morning and then having to turn around and play again. I give these guys a lot of credit for having some resiliency and perseverance to battle through it when all the time it didn’t look pretty. I thought we had really good ball movement on offense. We shot a real high percentage; the three-point helped us. I thought we executed. Obviously Kevin made some plays coming down the stretch and that helped, and I think we got stops when we needed to.”
On the performance of Enes Kanter and the bench…
“I thought Enes (Kanter) was a big help because having Serge (Ibaka) and Steven (Adams) in foul trouble was difficult. And I think when you take two defensive players off the floor like Steven and like Serge, Nick (Collison) and Enes needed to do a good job. I thought Enes’ defense got better in the second half. He did a much better job in the second half. Hewas big and we talked about that today with the guys coming off the bench that we were going to need their energy, their effort and to be ready to play and I give them all credit because they all stepped up and played extremely well.”