Flip Saunders Great Quotations

I got to know him when he was a player and he had season tickets right next to our bench. I didn't know him just as a season-ticket holder but as a friend. It's a great loss to the sports world and Minnesota. He always had a smile on his face and cared about kids. He always took time to sign autographs and talk to kids and try to help them.

This was a game I wish I could have been in the stands, just sitting there watching. This was a great basketball game between two teams who played hard and with a lot of emotion. It was a very entertaining game.

From what I read and hear, as a team and with Shaq, they feel like they are going to be able to turn it on when they need to. Veteran players have that belief. We go through that here in some games But I expect them to come with a great deal of energy.

He's a flat-out great shooter. You can never have enough of those guys.

He's playing great right now. I said one of the reasons they're playing so well right now is because of the play of Johnson and the play of (Danny) Granger. Those two guys have stepped up and they're playing at an extremely high level.

He's playing pretty good. He's been playing with the main guys and I think he's a lot stronger and obviously, playing on his national team (Serbia-Montenegro) this summer, he's in great condition.

He's just going to have to be a good boy. Bite his lip. We were thinking of getting Judge Judy, getting it on TV. But I don't think commissioner ( David ) Stern would go for that one. They'd probably get very great ratings.

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 think he deserves it. He's a guy who's had a great first half of the season. I'm not as concerned with just putting guys in by position; you know, because O'Neal's a big guy, put a big guy in there.

I thought, especially for our league, the fourth quarter was a great quarter. They saw a little bit about what NBA basketball is about: great plays by great players.

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.

We have a team that plays on the edge. You have to have that. All the great teams in this league have been like that.

Were not going to keep Michael at 11 or 14 points. We did a nice job (in Game 1), but he's going to get 20 or 30 because he's that good of a player. What we've got to do is make him earn those and make him be a volume scorer. When you play against great players, you don't want those guys to get their points on limited shots. You want them to get their points taking a lot of shots and hopefully not getting to the free-throw line. That has to be our main focus.

Ben was phenomenal. People talk about Bruce Bowen and others as the best defender. Bruce is a great individual defender. Ben is a great individual defender. But Ben Wallace might be one of the best that's played the game as a team defender.

When you get up 15 in your division through 45 games, what you're trying to do is you're focusing on what you have ahead and that's the playoffs. I think the players are going to be very focused and very excited about coming here Sunday night and playing in front of a great crowd in a great atmosphere.

When you play great ones, it's the team assignment. You have to make him a volume scorer. You can't let him get 30 points on 18 shots. What you want to is keep him out of the free-throw line, make him take a lot of shots if you can.

The thing I love about these guys is that, when we lose, they have taken it hard and decided to bounce back. This was a great win after a poor performance last night.

You're in a situation where the other team doesn't have anything to lose. Their backs are against the wall, and they're going to come out and play with a great amount of energy. They're going to play with confidence from the way they've played their last couple games. You know going in about that situation, so you know you have to go in and have a superior performance. You can't just come out and have an average performance.

This is going to be a great game for the fans. It's going to be a competitive game. But I don't know how much bearing it will have for either team down the road. I mean, if we go out and dominate them, I don't know what bearing that would have come playoff time, and same thing the other way.

Any time you are a competitor and you're not winning, you get frustrated. The great ones all do and he's going to be one of the greatest that ever played this game.

It's been pretty much a mirror from the standpoint of both teams have established their ability to win at home, they got great crowds at both places as far as the enthusiasm, and both our teams have been the best teams on the road. It's different sports, but we're both looking each other in the mirror.

I have to thank Charles (Barkley) for giving a great halftime talk when he said the game was over. I thought we were playing too perfect, but in the second half we played exceptionally well. When our four guys (four All-Stars from Detroit) were in we started to run some plays, and I think that helped us.

Charles (Barkley, TNT commentator) gave a great talk for us at halftime. He said the game was over.

It was a great reception. A lot of great fans, the people were great tonight and it was a good evening.

Antonio was great tonight. He's been playing like that for a while now. He has a lot of confidence in himself.

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.

At first you're there, you're happy to be there. ... Then the pressure becomes more to produce as you're there. There's no question that for young players, there's great excitement and enjoyment. But they have to get used to making the constant adjustments that happen over the course of a series and how every game, the intensity level kicks up more and more.

They got crossed up on the pick-and-roll and Kidd made a great shot. That was demoralizing.

It's a great loss for the sports world and Minnesota. He was someone that you always remember with a smile on his face. It's tough.

It's going to be a great challenging game for both teams. They are a great defensive team, but the reason we had some success in Minnesota was because of offensive ball movement and player movement. They want to lock you down on one side of the floor. If you can get the defense moving, you can have some success against them.

He's in a great rhythm. When you get someone who's playing in a rhythm, you don't want to change their routine. He feels comfortable, and he's playing well.