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NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: CAVALIERS v PISTONS

May 28, 2007

Flip Saunders

CLEVELAND, OHIO: Practice Day

Q. You've had a chance to look at the film, what were some of the things they were doing to limit Chauncey last night?
COACH SAUNDERS: Really not much. I mean, Chauncey probably got trapped less last night than he did in the previous games, and when he did get trapped, Sheed had threes so we really had some open looks. I think Chauncey missed some shots. I thought that the pace of our game was not probably where it needed to be, and I just thought that we took some -- took too many non-scoring-type shots, non-aggressive shots.

Q. Is he seeing something different? I mean, you see what's on film, but when he's in the game, he's not attacking like he normally does.
COACH SAUNDERS: That's something you'd have to ask him. I can't tell you what he's seeing. I mean, I just think he's not being as aggressive in situations as he needs to be. And a lot of times when he's like that, it carries over as far as the rest of the team. We don't maybe get into sets quite as quick and we're not as crisp, and we've got to get back to doing that.

Q. That all trickles down and affects Rip that way, too?
COACH SAUNDERS: Yeah. Last game, I thought that was a carbon copy I thought of Game 4 in Chicago for Rip. Rip was the exact same way. I thought he had the same body language. He didn't take cuts the way he normally takes cuts, running cuts. I thought he was just slow on a lot of his cuts and it carried over defensively in how he played as far as on defense, and I thought that they both just played not their normal game. They were very ineffective.

Q. How is Tayshaun's ankle?
COACH SAUNDERS: We'll see today. I think he's going to be okay. I don't know how much he'll do today. We'll just have to wait and see.

Q. How much of a concern is that to you if your two guards, that are all-star guards, don't improve?
COACH SAUNDERS: Well, it's always a concern. I mean, when you have your -- I mean, they're the main part of our team. That's how this team was built. When you have two guys that they average roughly 40 points a game between them, and they go into a game and they get half that, it puts your team very much at a disadvantage. So they've got to bring it, as does everybody else.

Q. You mentioned shot selection, is that part of why Cleveland was able to get that early offense with LeBron in transition?
COACH SAUNDERS: Well, we missed some shots. They hit some long rebounds, and LeBron was -- as we knew, home crowd, you're going to be aggressive as far as early, and they had some lay-ups early. Late they didn't. They made really tough shots down the stretch. I think that when -- we didn't get into our offense quick enough. We needed to get into our offense quicker so we could turn it over a little bit and not be so much where it's a one- or two-option-type offense.

Q. Last two games we've seen a young guy kind of really contribute, Maxiell in Game 2, last night Gibson. Talk a little bit about Daniel Gibson.
COACH SAUNDERS: Well, we couldn't take advantage of -- he basically did a great job on any mismatches. He stripped Tay a couple times. He bodied people up, and he made big shots and made some big free throws. So I thought last night, as Maxie was a difference maker as far as in Game 2, he was definitely a difference maker as far as in Game 3.

Q. Does anything change in terms of scouting report when a guy does --
COACH SAUNDERS: No, because we knew that he's a spot-up three-point shooter. You know the things that he's going to do, it's just a matter of being able to take those away. Part of the success of that also is LeBron's ability to find those people.
You know, as I said before, LeBron, you're not going to keep him down. A guy that's a 27-, 30-point scorer, he's going to score points. So it's not his scoring, but what I didn't like is that he got nine assists. So you're looking at a situation where he's playing in a game where roughly, of the 88 points that were scored, he had a direct involvement in 50 of those, with the 32 points that he scored and then the nine assists. That's not even counting maybe passes that he had that guys got fouled and he didn't get an assist for.
So those are the things we have to limit because he's got the ability to define and get set on the weak side for him to not down a three, so that was my concern going into the series, playing against LeBron, was not letting him do what he had done in the New Jersey series where he did everything. I said going in that I thought his most impressive stat coming into our series was his high assists more than anything else.

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