Flip Saunders Defense Quotations

I think what we can do now is we can change our personality. Defense can carry us at times. But I thought in the fourth quarter, our offense, we executed. To score 28 points down the stretch in the fourth quarter that's pretty impressive.

I thought the last three or four minutes our defense was impressive.. If we play like that for 48 minutes it would make things a lot easier for ourselves.

We have a lot of confidence in our defense and when you're scoring offensively, they both feed off of each other.

He's gotten really aggressive and he's making big shots. Watching them play a lot, he gets a lot of shots in the last five seconds of games. He will put pressure on your defense because he can shoot the three, but he's also improved his game getting to the basket.

The biggest thing that I was impressed with was the last three or four minutes, our defense was (good). It we played like that for 48 (minutes), we'd make things a lot easier for ourselves.

That was Detroit basketball. The more we played against them, the more we understood their sets and we were able to contest their shots. If we play lock-down defense like we did tonight, we can play with these guys.

The defense turned it up, no question. Offensively, we turned things up. ... It was at both ends. That's why this has been a championship team. It was a fun game to watch. I'm sure the people at TNT got their money's worth.

We're doing a lot of good things on defense and that's how we're winning as many games as we are.

It didn't matter if (Bryant) had 50, 40, 20, 10 ? the idea was for us to win. The idea was not to try to expose our defense where all the sudden, you have other guys that have career games.

What they're going to try to do is do what they did during the season, try to get more off open-floor, transition-type opportunities, and try to attack that way and not have to go against our half-court defense as much. That will probably be their biggest adjustment.

We know when to lock down. Our defense hasn't slipped at all.

That was as good of a job as I have seen against him. I don't think our defense has slipped. We're there.

It's going to be a great challenging game for both teams. They are a great defensive team, but the reason we had some success in Minnesota was because of offensive ball movement and player movement. They want to lock you down on one side of the floor. If you can get the defense moving, you can have some success against them.

When you take a team like Milwaukee that can really score and you hold them to 74 points your team defense is doing something. That's the staple of our team.

I thought we came out with a good focus, especially after a back-to-back. We came out methodically offensively and defensively went into a swarming defense and controlled things right from the beginning.