Flip Saunders Start Quotations

I would have liked to have seen the guys get off to a better start early, with their main group.

I think what it does is it shows the character of the team, the whole roster, your ability to go out every night and perform at a high level. To win that many games, you don't take too many days off. Especially the start that we had, it seemed like everyone was playing pretty much their Super Bowl.

I think I recall that we lost our last couple games in the exhibition season, and we got off to a pretty good start with the regular season. These guys have been there. They know that this is when it all begins.

We'd like to start getting our bench in that 70- to 80-minute range to give our starters some rest.

We wanted to try to start establishing our bench more, so basically we're playing three guys and giving those guys a little bit more minutes.

Whether we play well or don't play well come Sunday, will have no bearing on how we've done this season. As I recall, we lost our last couple games in the exhibition season and got off to a pretty good start in the regular season.

When you get in these games, it's very interesting. The games start out being very fun and everything else and then all of a sudden, it gets very serious and very competitive.

When you get to 41 games you get him a few minutes at a time, start getting into the rhythm.

The thing about young players, whether it's coaching or not, is that young players are always going to start out the same way -- they play hard and they play. That's who they are. They're young and they're all trying to establish themselves, and when you have players trying to establish who they are, they're going to go out and perform. Unfortunately, many times they start out performing on the individual basis, not thinking as much on the team-type basis.

They showed us how to start playing again. Our first group started playing a lot of one-and-one, and that's not us.

They came out and were very aggressive. As I told the guys before the game, in an emotional game like this, they're going to play extremely well and play aggressive. You have to match their intensity and make shots. The two things you need to do to start the game, we didn't do.

We got pretty much what we wanted offensively. Defensively, we were like vultures to start games.

It's a credit to the way these guys came into camp and came in focused. They've made some big plays. I thought we could get off to a good start but you can't expect to go 20-3.