Flip Saunders Days Quotations

I think we've gone through the dog days now. What we are doing now is preparing ourselves mentally for the next 29 days leading up to the playoffs. We are 53-13 overall and 29-2 at home. I'd say we have taken care of ourselves fairly well.

I think what it does is it shows the character of the team, the whole roster, your ability to go out every night and perform at a high level. To win that many games, you don't take too many days off. Especially the start that we had, it seemed like everyone was playing pretty much their Super Bowl.

We kept him out today. He's getting treatment. He's going to be OK. It's probably good that we have a couple days off and don't have a short turnaround, because it gives him more of a chance to get ready.

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.

The nice thing is we have a couple of days off.

It's incentive to get days off (to rest players) and preparation for coaches. Any time you can get into a playoff situation and get a three- or four-day rest, you can get back to your basics with some good practices.

It's incentive to get days off. ... Any time you can get in a playoff situation where you can get a three- or four-day rest, it's almost like a mini-training camp situation, and you can get back to your basics. Get back and have a couple of good practices and really kind of get calmed down from winning a series and get rejuvenated and get back up and get into that crescendo where you're playing extremely well again for the first game.

In the past, you had a guy who got nicked up, you had to make a decision. You put him on the IRE and he sat out days and games, or a coach said, 'Well, we're going to sit him out, but we're not going to replace him.' Right now, you have the luxury of, if a guy gets the flu, you can sit him out that night and if he's better the next night, you can let him play.

He's making progress. What will help him is that after Orlando (tonight) we have two days of practice. He will be able to have two hard team practices, and we can evaluate him after that.

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.

You've got a team that had three days off playing against a team that played four games in five days, in four different cities, and a back-to-back situation. They played with a great amount of energy and they carried that energy to a win.