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WNBA FINALS: MYSTICS VS SUN

October 1, 2019

Mike Thibault

Washington, D.C.

Connecticut - 99, Washington - 87

MIKE THIBAULT: I mean, it's a pretty simple game. When you give up 90 points to their starters, 56 points in the paint and 17 offensive boards for 28 points, that's a tough way to try to win a game. Give them credit; Jonquel was great the other night, bounced back from their other game. But we didn't control really any of those three players that scored. But the rebounding was a huge concern.

When Elena went out, I thought that she did a terrific job in Game 1 on Jonquel on the boards, and that went out the door. So we've got to do it the hard way.

Questions?

Q. Is there an update on Elena's status that you know of at the moment?
MIKE THIBAULT: She's going to get an MRI tomorrow on her back. It didn't look good, so we'll see. We'll see what the MRI says and treatment tomorrow. The only good thing, I didn't look forward to having four days between games, but right now that looks like a benefit that we didn't have at the start of the series.

We'll see. But I have no idea right now, and we won't have anything probably for a couple days until we see what the tests show and what treatment looks like.

But it wasn't good. On the very first lay-up that she went up for, it grabbed on her, and she came down and just immediately said, "Give me a sub."

Q. Could you talk a little bit about what you saw in Tianna Hawkins tonight.
MIKE THIBAULT: Well, we saw somebody come off the bench and give us a lift. That's the Tianna we had earlier in the season. We needed that tonight. Her confidence was good. You know, our bench scored 50 points. I mean, that's a big plus for us. She and Emma [Meesseman] and Aerial [Powers] did a good job getting us back in the game. We just couldn't get stops in the last four minutes, and we had a tough shooting night with a couple other people.

Q. If Elena had any problems with her back yesterday, what might have happened if she felt --
MIKE THIBAULT: Not so much yesterday. She's just had kind of ongoing, late in the season, just tightness, and we've been able to treat it, and it's responded pretty well, and she's been okay. But it's the one nightmare I've had for the last month is seeing her lying on her back. I watched that in 2015 when she was in Chicago, and it wasn't a good sight for them, and it wasn't a good sight for me now.

I don't know. I mean, I don't even know what to tell you about it right now other than it is an injury and we're going to figure it out.

Q. Alyssa Thomas has played the full 80 minutes and I've seen you've thrown a bunch of different looks at her, but she's had her way in the paint.
MIKE THIBAULT: Yeah, she's a bully in the paint, and she's learned that that's her game. She has a pretty incredible touch for a player that just kind of floats it up there and the ball bounces around and goes in a lot for her. It's something that she's perfected. Some of it's come because of her injuries; she's had to learn to do things a little differently. But it's frustrating that somebody at that size is outworking people because she gets tips -- she can't even fully extend and she's still getting offensive rebound tips. That's sheer will right now. And the question for my team is do you want to match that to win on Sunday, or do you want to give in?

You know, right now today, their will was greater. They came out with a great sense of purpose. I thought we got deflated a little bit when Elena went out, and it took us too long to recover from that and say, okay, we can still win this. I commend us for getting back in the game, but the ending then was frustrating because it looked a lot like the second quarter.

Q. After Game 1, you had said that some things needed to be fixed, that they were fixable. After tonight's game outside of --
MIKE THIBAULT: We've got a lot to fix after tonight, rebounding being one. That would be the first place to go.

I thought we got -- let Courtney Williams get off to a good start again, and we need to look at how we defend her a little better. I thought we pressured her a little bit better today, but she still made some tough shots. I mean, they made some threes with a hand in their face, and give them credit, too. Part of it sometimes isn't what you do, it's how well they play, too. We didn't play our best basketball, but they played their best basketball tonight.

Q. I know you were able to -- with Elena in Game 1 you were able to throw three bigs at them at times. How much of not being able to do that impacted that battle on the glass?
MIKE THIBAULT: Oh, I think it impacts it. Elena herself is one of the better defensive rebounders in the league. You're not going to hold Jonquel off the whole series but she got zero in that game. If you watch the tape, Elena was almost textbook in her blockouts on Jonquel. Tonight I thought we were trying to rebound with our head under the rim, and you don't get very many defensive rebounds that way. If you're pushed under and you're standing, you're basically having to reach behind you to rebound. That's not a good position to be in.

And I thought that was -- we played the big lineup a little bit differently with Emma and Tianna and LaToya [Sanders], but you took the MVP out of the lineup, it's different.

Q. Obviously there's a lot of unknown with Elena, but you have in your own career a model for this, having gone through a Finals with an injured Lindsay Whalen.
MIKE THIBAULT: Yeah, and that didn't work out so good. So what's the point?

Q. Are there lessons you can take from that and what you experienced there and implement them this time around?
MIKE THIBAULT: I mean, I think it's a little bit different in that Lindsay was our point guard, and that made a bigger impact on our team in the sense that our offense started with her. We still have our point guards, but what Elena does is take pressure off of other people because it stretches the defense.

I think it was encouraging that Tianna stepped up tonight and made them pay. I do truly believe that you can win games like this in this situation if Elena doesn't play, but you have to play perfect in the fundamentals in a sense. You might miss some shots, you might turn it over occasionally, but you can't give up the extra possessions. I mean, it's a four-point game, but at the end of the game they end up taking 12 more shots than us because of the offensive rebounds.

I thought we did a good job of taking care of the ball for most of the night, but 84 shots to 72 is hard for us to overcome. We usually rely on getting a few more -- now, it's made up a little bit of difference -- a couple free throw difference, but that right there if you give them that many possessions, you're playing with fire.

Q. This isn't the first time you've had to play without Elena. Did you address it with the team in a stoppage or halftime or --
MIKE THIBAULT: No, what I addressed at halftime was, are you going to feel sorry for yourself or are you going to play? I thought our defense was terrible in the second quarter. I thought they -- we showed them a clip, there was a sequence, loose ball in front of their bench, they hustled for it, Alyssa Thomas dove and saved it from going out of bounds, they picked the ball up off the floor and Jasmine [Thomas] drove with a few seconds on the shot clock basically uncontested down the lane. And it was that sort of thing that we talked about at halftime, is that it doesn't matter who's out there right now, do you want to make a defensive effort?

And we came out and did that in the third quarter. We held them to 17 points in the third quarter, and we looked like our Mystics team defensively, but we couldn't sustain it to the end. And I left people out there a long time, but they did, too. And at the end, Jonquel Jones came in and made a difference when the game was close, when they brought her back in.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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