Flip Saunders Tough Quotations

It's one of those things, if you put him out there for 10 minutes, he wants 15. If you put him out there for 15, he wants 20. That's the toughest thing about young players coming to championship-caliber teams.

Ben is our energy. I would be amazed if he wasn't the defensive player of the year again just from everything he does. He's our lock-down guy. When we have energy, we are tough to beat and tough to score on. When we don't, we can be pretty ordinary. And Ben is usually the catalyst for that energy.

Before the season, we said there were going to be two tough stretches -- being on the road so much early and this one, where we are playing 10 games in 10 different cities leading into the break. We knew it would be tough. We're just trying to grind our way through.

It's tough. It's always tough to play on the road. It's even tougher when you feel you aren't getting a fair shake.

You have to have players that really accept challenges, that like to compete and really like to play on the road more than they do at home. It is more challenging. It's tough to win on the road, no matter who you play.

When you play 82 games, it's tough to play at a super, super level every game.

When you play 82 games, it's tough to play at an unbelievably high level all 82 games. Right now we're playing at a high level. Our level that we're playing at is where many teams' mountains are.

We made him take a lot of tough shots.

Everyone can get better. You can always get better rebounding-wise. The toughest thing in our league is, with the way the rules have changed from last year, where you have to contain people out on the perimeter, and you can't touch people. That's always something that's very difficult.

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.

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.

We were all guards. And it makes it tough to get all those guys a lot of minutes. That's always the toughest thing.

We've had different people carry us at different times. That's what has made this a very good team, and has made us tougher to play against.

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.

It's always tough to play on the road and I thought Seattle played really, really well. This is always a tough place to play. We were able to get ourselves back in the game in the first half but we just could not shake them.

They are always tough ones, when you've been gone for seven days and you come back and are expected to win. I thought we executed when we needed to - in the second half.