Flip Saunders Volume Quotations

Were not going to keep Michael at 11 or 14 points. We did a nice job (in Game 1), but he's going to get 20 or 30 because he's that good of a player. What we've got to do is make him earn those and make him be a volume scorer. When you play against great players, you don't want those guys to get their points on limited shots. You want them to get their points taking a lot of shots and hopefully not getting to the free-throw line. That has to be our main focus.

When you play great ones, it's the team assignment. You have to make him a volume scorer. You can't let him get 30 points on 18 shots. What you want to is keep him out of the free-throw line, make him take a lot of shots if you can.

The bottom line is, he's going to score. What you can't let him do is get into that 40-point range. You have to make him a volume scorer -- what he's done now is score without taking a lot of shots. We've got to make him work more, offensively and defensively.

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.