Flip Saunders Five Quotations

I don't judge somebody that's had five years of stellar work -- not only with the team but in the community, and how he has been in practice -- and judge him by one incident. You judge him on the long haul.

He's gotten really aggressive and he's making big shots. Watching them play a lot, he gets a lot of shots in the last five seconds of games. He will put pressure on your defense because he can shoot the three, but he's also improved his game getting to the basket.

I think from talking to a lot of coaches, I'd say there's a pretty good chance of three going and a possibility of four. Just from talking to coaches. But you've had a lot of coaches say they would vote for five. Whether five could make it would be tough. Even if four makes it -- even three -- when you don't have any of them voted in by the fans, that's pretty unbelievable.

I thought, 'You're coming to a team that just won a championship and was five minutes away from winning another,' so your question is how receptive will they be to what you want to do,

I would hope there would be at least three, maybe more. As coaches, we talk about team play, how important it is. This is an opportunity from a league standpoint to show to people - whether it's college kids or high school kids or AAU kids - how important team play really is. It's a very rare opportunity you'd have as a league to maybe put five guys from one team in.

I was really fortunate in the past five months to wait and evaluate situations. I was going to wait and find the right situation to walk into.

I've been here for five months, and this team still amazes me with its poise.

The way this team is built, our bench guys are meant to play together in clusters with our main group. When you put all five guys on the floor, they're not as effective as when three of those guys play with a couple of starters.

Any time you take a job where a team won the championship and got within five minutes of winning another, you wonder, how are they going to accept you? But they've been very open to coaching, very open to doing whatever we've asked.

You've got a team that had three days off playing against a team that played four games in five days, in four different cities, and a back-to-back situation. They played with a great amount of energy and they carried that energy to a win.

This is a guy who played a role for 82 games. His role isn't going to change that much, especially when you are talking about a guy who's been hurt for the last five days. I don't think anyone should expect him to come in and be a superman.

As well as he's playing, all five guys have to be locked into him. Nobody's going to take him one-on-one and prevent him from getting wherever he wants. He's too quick and too good. All five guys have to be in a position to help.

This is the third of our five steps.

This is the third of our five steps, but this one might be the most important of the first four, because of the 2-2-1-1-1 format in the conference finals.