The New Orleans Hornets are close to making history once again. Thanks to their 101-79 Game 5 win over the Spurs, the Hornets have a 3-2 series lead and are one win from reaching the Western Conference Finals. No Hornets team in franchise history has ever reached a Conference Finals series.

18,246 juiced up, gold-shirt wearing fans watched the Hornets play with the intensity that got them a 2-0 series lead. 

The Hornets blocked shots, contested shots, rebounded and most of all played with the passion called for by their head coach. "We knew the magnitude of this game," said Hornets point guard Chris Paul who had 22 points and 14 assists in the game. "Once you get knocked down you got to hop right back up. We were the aggressor tonight. We weren't the past two games."

Hornets forward David West was definitely ready to play. West scored a career playoff high 38 points. "I initially just wanted to come out and be aggressive," said West. "We treated this like a Game 7. We didn't want to go back to San Antonio with them having the opportunity to close us out. We wanted to come in be super aggressive and from a team standpoint we were able to maintain our aggressiveness from start to finish."

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West was held to just 10 points in game 4 and was visibly focused the last two days at practice. "He was pretty upset with the way he played in Game 4," said Scott. "He wasn't happy at all about his performance and like I said if you've been around D-West long enough you know he's going to come back and he was going to play a great game tonight and he carried us."

West's performance was even more amazing in that the four-year veteran played the entire game with a hurt back. "Right before we brake huddle to come out to the game we say 'no excuses'. There's no excuse from anywhere to not go out play and compete regardless of how I was feeling. I just knew how important this game was for us as a basketball team."

Equally as impressive was the Hornets defense. The Spurs were held to 37-percent shooting from the field. "They were excellent," said Spurs forward Tim Duncan who finished up the night with 10 points on a 5-for-18 shooting performance. "They did a great job of crowding the lane and also getting back to our shooters. I didn't shoot the ball very well."

"I thought the New Orleans defense was great tonight, just simply fantastic especially in the third quarter and that's when they got away from us and that was the end of the game," said a frustrated Spurs head coach Greg Popovich.

Now the goal for the Hornets is to bottle up the same energy shown at the Hive for three games and take it with them to San Antonio. "It's crazy to see how active we are on defense and stuff like that at home and we got to find some way, anyway to do that in San Antonio," said Paul. "With the opportunity to go there and close it out we'll find a way."

It was the fifth straight game in which the decision was 11 points or more for the winning team and all five games has seen the home team play substantially better than the road squad. It's a trend Paul wants to see end, "We can't count on coming back here having home-court advantage to win Game 7. We got to go to San Antonio with the mindset to close it. Coach told us to approach this game like it was Game 7 and we got to approach Game 6 like that."

One key determining factor on whether or not the Hornets can steal Game 6 will be on the health status of West and center Tyson Chandler. Chandler had to be helped off the court at the end of the game and showed trouble in simply standing up.

"Well it's Tyson's toe and David's back. I think it's pretty serious, updated Scott following the game. "Is it going to keep them out of Game 6? Probably not, but again we just got to make sure we get the treatment on them, get some rest and get ready for Thursday."