OUR MEETING WORKED

Sometimes people make too much of a big deal about ``players’ only’’ meetings, but this one really seemed to have a good effect for us. After all, we were up 41 points last night on Cleveland, who’s got the best record in the NBA. Let me say that again: We were up by 41 points!!!!

Our meeting was supposed to last five minutes, but we went more than 20, and just about everybody on the team got up and spoke whatever was on their mind. My message was that we’re a great team and when we play every night with the energy and focus that we bring to the big game, we are a really good team.

It’s kind of hard for me to tell guys that it’s time to be serious, because I’m one of the silliest guys on the team and everybody knows that I love having as much fun as I can. But the playoffs are nearly here and it’s time for us to lock in mentally. We have the kind of team that can win a championship. Chances like this don’t have too often and we can’t let this opportunity pass us by.

I thought one of the things that would help us improve would be to make sure we warm up harder before the game and at halftime. We have been getting off to slow starts and having bad third quarters, and maybe that’s because we were goofing off in our warm-ups some.

We fixed that last night and ended up jumping on Cleveland from the start and blowing them out in the third quarter. Did I mention that we were up by 41 points?!?!?!?!?

For some reason, we just match up well against Cleveland. Our whole game plan is to keep LeBron out of the lane, don’t let him get dunks in transition and make him take jump shots. He beat us with jumpers in Cleveland, but he missed some of them here in Orlando.

We have that confidence that we can beat any team in the league. We know we’re good enough to win a championship as long as we’re playing focused and hungry with a lot of energy.

Maybe we just needed to remind ourselves tha t at our ``players’ only’’ meeting. Hey, whatever it takes, baby.

Peace. -- DWIGHT