When questioned about potential physical play in the series, Jackson took his first swing.
"We don't have a smackdown mentality," he said. "You might have seen that with [Kevin] Garnett on [Orlando's Dwight] Howard in Game 6 in Boston, where he was smacking Howard's arm and was finally called for an offensive foul. That's not our kind of team. We don't go out there to smack people around. I call it more resiliency. We're a more resilient ball club. We try to stay strong and play hard. But we're going to have to withstand some of that. We're going to have to play through it. We have some guys who are capable of playing to that style in [Derek] Fisher and Ron [Artest] and obviously Kobe [Bryant]. But our big guys are going to have to stand up because that's basically what got the Celtics through Orlando." Lamar Odom(notes) took a more diplomatic approach. "[All the series] have been physically demanding, even this last one, all the running we had to do," said Odom. "This one will be physical, if they let us play a little bit." Jackson did show sympathy for Kendrick Perkins(notes), one of the Celtics' most physical players. The Lakers coach said his team had no desire to frustrate Perkins in an effort to force the center into a technical foul. One more technical and Perkins will earn an automatic one-game suspension. "I don't even like to think about those kind of things," said Jackson. "Those things I think should be wiped out. Flagrant fouls. Technical fouls. It just means the longer you've been in the playoffs the more penalized you are. It seems like that's not a really good code right now." |
