Flip Saunders Conference Quotations

Part of it is teams that were not very good have gotten better, which makes for a much more competitive conference. What developed for a few years in the Western Conference has now come back to the East, where there aren't really any gimme games.

Our division was closed with 20-something games to go. The conference was closed with 10 or 12 games to go, so everyone turned their attention toward out west and the chase that was happening out there.

This is the third of our five steps, but this one might be the most important of the first four, because of the 2-2-1-1-1 format in the conference finals.

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.