513 Quotes by Flip Saunders

I told Ben when I talked to him that I have a lot of respect for him and everything he does.

Like I said, I think a coach is as good as the players he has. You do have to drive them. You've got to make sure to put them in the right situations. And we have a group that's very committed as far as what we're doing.

I thought our full-court trap changed the tempo of the game out of free throw situations. And I thought we played some zone the first half that helped us a little bit. I think both teams tried some things to see what worked and to use down the road.

We said he was feeling good, so we just let him go. He had 37 points, nine assists, one turnover -- I mean, that's a pretty nice statement for the All-Star team, or whatever.

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.

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.

Simmons is their second-best scorer, and he's got the ability to post up. If you take your three-man off of him, now all of a sudden, you've got Rip guarding somebody down in the block a lot.

I think we've gone through the dog days now. What we are doing now is preparing ourselves mentally for the next 29 days leading up to the playoffs. We are 53-13 overall and 29-2 at home. I'd say we have taken care of ourselves fairly well.

We said going in the idea was to not get anybody hurt and make sure that the guys we had to play broke a sweat and didn't get too stale and give our young guys an opportunity to play in a heated situation against some top players.