Flip Saunders Call Quotations

The satisfying thing is, right now we've put basically 16 games in the loss column between us and the next closest team in our division. When you can do that with 26 games to go, you're in pretty good shape.

When I watch film, they played zone, ... They just didn't call it zone.

I thought the first unit played well in both of their stints. They basically took control in the third quarter.

That wasn't our night. Just physically a step slow, and mentally we just didn't react as quickly as we normally do. Just not as sharp.

You saw both teams as basically who they are -- meat-and-potato teams. Maybe this is why the game wasn't hyped as much. This is what basketball was meant to be like -- play defense, play team basketball.

You saw both teams as basically who they are - both meat-and-potato teams.

I don't always judge things by wins and losses. I just go by how you play and the opportunities to win. We played 51 games, and out of those 51 we had nine losses and probably only three of those games where we basically didn't have opportunities to win in the fourth quarter.

We seemed to lose our energy. They were more aggressive and the team that's more aggressive is going to get the loose balls, get the calls and have things fall their way.

It was a good learning experience for those young guys to play a team that was basically in a must-win situation.

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.

Ben works on it a lot, ... We do a lot of shooting as a team, 15-, 17-foot shooting, which is basically free throws. We shoot probably 100 of those a day. So he's getting a lot more free throws.

I talked to the guys at halftime and basically said that we were not as competitive. I thought that the second half they played exceptionally well. In these type of games, it takes a lot of time to get used to playing with guys. Every guy did something in a very positive way.

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.

Every time I go into a game I have, I don't know if you want to call it a cheat sheet or whatever, but I have a list of plays that I'm probably going to run that night. And there's no question that this last week that list has been a lot shorter as far as things we're going to run. There's some things we've put in, some wrinkles in some situations and maybe we'll lay away from some of those not to give them an extra scouting opportunity.