Flip Saunders
Flip Saunders
Philip Daniel "Flip" Saunderswas an American basketball player and coach. During his career, he coached the Minnesota Timberwolves, Detroit Pistons, and Washington Wizards...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth23 February 1955
CityCleveland, OH
fine matter playing winning
There's a fine line. As I told our guys, it's not a matter or winning or losing, it's playing good, and if you play good, you win.
aggressive anybody ben center dominating goes middle question
There's no question that Ben has been as dominating as a center in what he does as anybody in the league. I told him he's kind of like a middle linebacker in football. He patrols that middle and goes from an aggressive standpoint.
ankle bad easy games gets hurt leg people players position sit watch work
The thing you have to watch out for is if you sit a guy, and his leg gets weaker. We're not going to put him in a position where he's going to hurt his ankle more. People out there, they don't know how bad the ankle is. It's way too easy for everyone to say, ?Just sit him and not have him play.' But players work 82 games to get into a rhythm, to play well in the playoffs.
bounce decided great guys hard last love performance poor taken win
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.
coaching establish hard individual performing players start thinking trying whether
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.
finals last playing playoff team understand
The thing is, we're not going to change. You have to understand something: This team has a lot of playoff experience. They've been to the Finals the last two years. They're not playing differently than what they've played. That's how they play.
ball beat road turn win yourselves
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.
guys paul pick seemed stuff types
Sometimes in these types of situations, you want to get some organization. I thought that the way these guys play together, they can get some organization. We went through some stuff with Paul (Pierce) and he seemed to pick things up and play well off those guys.
teams turned waiting
Teams are waiting for us to get things turned up. When that happens, that's when we go on our little runs.
ability depends flow guys natural step time
Sometimes it's natural to take a step back a bit. It just depends on the flow of the game. But the one thing he does -- and a lot of our other guys do -- when it comes time to clamp down, he has the ability to do that.
almost believing coaching firing maybe question tendency
Sometimes, I think, when you're fired, you have a tendency to maybe question things that you do. For me, the firing almost entrenched me more in believing that philosophically, from a coaching standpoint, that this was the right way of going about doing it.
ball came geared good group job offense played player rick since threw toward
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.
anybody guys players sweat
Same thing. We don't want to get anybody hurt. Just let guys get a sweat and give some of our young players an opportunity.
four games holding prior reason straight teams tough
The one reason we have been in the games prior to this was because of our defense. We had four (actually three) straight games of holding teams in the 70s. That's pretty tough to do in this league.