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
bad east grind night team took tough tougher trust west
If you took a team from the West and made it play in the East on a nightly basis, they would find out how tough it is. It's such a grind. The East is tougher mentally. It's a grind night in and night out. . . . Trust me. The East is not as bad as they make it out to be.
knew time
I knew it was time then to get him out. All of them.
knew rookie run year
I knew he would play. He's a competitor. That's why he's going to run away with the rookie of the year this year.
black game
The game is not black and white, the game is grey. If I could tell you everything that's going to happen, it'd be really easy.
basketball character credit extremely four goes high mark players talked team time touched turned year
The first time I talked about that, we went out and turned it over the first four times we touched the ball. That mark I credit to players who are extremely disciplined and players who know their roles. They don't play out of character and that goes back to what I've talked about all year -- this team has a very high basketball intelligence.
coast energy game passion seemed terrible trip west
The first game back after a West Coast trip is always dangerous. I thought we had terrible energy and terrible passion in the first half. We seemed very disinterested.
character directly fame hall player reason reflected team
The character that we have as a team is directly reflected because of him. The reason he was a Hall of Fame player was because of that character.
blocking defensive fourth guy might mission player send steals trophy year
The guy that has been on a mission here is Ben. They might as well take the Defensive Player of the Year trophy and send it here for the fourth time, because when you look at all the things he's doing - defensive rebounding, blocking shots, steals - he's just doing everything.
anxiety days dog guys multiply prior situation somewhere teams top tough upset week
The dog days are always the 10 days prior to All-Star break. That's always a tough time. You see a lot of teams get upset because guys say, 'OK, I've got a week off, I'm going somewhere for All-Star break.' Multiply that on top of our situation of guys wondering, 'Well, am I going to be an All-Star or not?' There's always that anxiety of wondering.
difference extremely few four game games last night played sharp three together
The difference is they play one game a week, they don't play three games in four days. We're kind of in a different situation. And part of it was how sharp we've been. We've been extremely sharp the last few weeks. That's how they played (Sunday) night together as a group.
accomplish game guys nice step win
You want to try to win every game you step out, but I think it would be nice to try to accomplish something like that at home. It's one of these situations, when we go in, all 12 guys got to play well because all 12 guys are going to have opportunities.
supposed
You want to go in, play solidly for 48 (minutes) and play how you're supposed to play.
brought fine gotta
You've gotta realize, Chauncey went 6-for-6 and brought us back making threes in the fourth. It's a fine line.
against amount carried days energy five four games great played playing team three
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.