Flip Saunders Beat Quotations

He has his niche. Defensively, he's got that quick first step. He can take away that first move. And most times defensively, people get beat off the first move.

Rip did a great job and Redd didn't have a lot of breathing room. One of the reasons we aren't a big fouling team is that we don't produce a lot of steals. We don't jump out and we don't gamble. We play position defense. That's why so often our man-to-man looks like a zone. We try to make teams beat us over the top and contest every shot.

I thought we made great adjustments in the second half. You can talk about turning it up, but I think the big thing is that our team has the ability to see how a team plays, then make the adjustments to get into their weaknesses. You can turn up your energy, but you still have to be able to beat the other team.

To our credit, we calmed down and just played basketball. The thing is, especially on the road, you put yourself in a position to win games. We don't beat ourselves.

Ben is our energy. I would be amazed if he wasn't the defensive player of the year again just from everything he does. He's our lock-down guy. When we have energy, we are tough to beat and tough to score on. When we don't, we can be pretty ordinary. And Ben is usually the catalyst for that energy.

Delfino really took advantage of his time. He's the one guy we have (on the bench) who can beat people off the bounce, off the dribble. He can create plays for himself and for other people.

I've always said that to win on the road you have to defend, you have to not beat yourselves and you have to not turn the ball over.

They tried to beat us off the dribble as much as they can, which they did. We closed things down in the stretch. We had some guys who made some big plays.

The biggest thing is he's going to help us so much defensively, people aren't going to beat him out there.

They don't quit. They keep on coming at you. There were times we had them down, they could have (given up), but they came right back. That's why they've been able to beat some good teams lately.

It's going to be a good challenge for us to play against them. I think our guys are all of the opinion, no matter what anyone says, when people play against us, they want to show that they're better than us or can beat us.