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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every team has a chance to win, whether you are playing Detroit, Miami, New Jersey or whoever. There are no bargains in this thing where somebody is just going to walk through the first round. That's just how this league operates.
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As I said in the locker room, people die to get to 50 (wins). To get to 60 is really something. Every win beyond that shows that you've been able to play at a pretty high level for a long time.
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Coming in from the outside, you could see that this team was hurt from what happened last year in Game 7. Sometimes you think over the course of time, they say that time heals wounds. But time just didn't seem to heal that wound.
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Do we play hard? Yeah, we play hard. There are situations where they hit us. That's the way basketball is.
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Very much so. It's something as coaches that we're not used to. You don't really go through that very much. I guess I would liken it to maybe the last week of the exhibition season when you're trying to get ready for the regular season. You want to improve and you want to keep sharp, you want to give people opportunities, you want to be competitive and you still want to win.