Flip Saunders Job Quotations

I thought he missed some shots, but he made plays. Sometimes I look at a player's ability to get good shots and he got good shots. I thought he also did a nice job on Ray Allen .

Rip did a good job of understanding where help might be, tried to send him to as much help as he could and contested pretty much most of his shots.

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.

We'll continue to throw different things. I think the last few games we've done a better job as far as some of our rotations.

That was too good a look. But Maurice did a nice job closing out on him.

That was as good of a job as I have seen against him. I don't think our defense has slipped. We're there.

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 did as good a job as you can on Shaq when you play him one-on-one. His defensive presence gave us the ability to shut down some of their other people.

I've been in situations where I've taken bad teams and moved them in the right direction. In those situations, there is no pressure. Would it have been easy for me to take another job and not have as much (pressure)? Pressure is what you put on yourself. I don't really feel any pressure walking into a situation.

We did a good job setting screens. We changed it a little bit on some of his runs. He did more change of pace. He'd change, run, stop, then he took off again. And Chauncey delivered. We set screens a little bit lower to get Rip a little bit more room coming off those screens to try and read.

Right now, they're not as predictable. With Jermaine a lot, they came down, they threw it in the post, they played off him a lot. Here, they go to different people, they have a lot more ball movement, player movement. It's an offense geared toward everybody. I think Rick (Carlisle) has done a really good job with that group since they made that move.

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.

That's even more unbelievable than not missing any games. Part of that is the (players') makeup and how they take care of themselves. And part of it is our medical people and the job they do. It's a total approach.

I told Ben after, I had been in the Western Conference for a lot of years and I have coached against Dirk many times. I don't think I had seen as good a job of playing a guy one-on-one as that. Dirk made some shots, but he really had to work. We wanted to make him a volume scorer, and 25 points on 23 shots, that's pretty good.