And if you talk to our three best players, they all think we have a good team,' ... If you talk to Jason, his attitude is as positive as I've heard since then. When your better players think you have a good team, that's a very positive thing.'

All things being equal, you want people that want to play for you. The determination is, what does he have left in his game?

He probably won't play until after Christmas. We want him to be 100 percent.

Before, teams would load up on (Carter). Now it is much harder to do that.

I'm sure that the league will attempt to find out who the official was.

It was a confidential conversation, and I don't really want to comment on it.

It just wasn't working out here for him. In assessing it, I don't think it was going to work out for him here. That was part of it.

It just wasn't working out here for (Jackson). The two players that we lost weren't playing.

It's sort of been a frustrating year for him. It hasn't worked out the way he envisioned it. It's just one of those things that up to this point it hasn't worked out the way both he and we envisioned.

It was a shock. We had scheduled a press conference. Obviously, we did not think there was going to be anything wrong whatsoever.