WNBA FINALS: MONARCHS v SUN

September 17, 2005

John Whisenant

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: We can deal with what's coming up tomorrow and we need to play well. We need to stay focused, be alert, be intense, play our defensive system, execute, and we should be fine.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: We're happy. We're sorry we lost, we're sorry we made a defensive mistake and didn't win the second game, but the fact is we did. And now, if somebody would have told us last April we could go in a best-of-three series and have the first two at our home court and win two out of three, we would be tickled to death.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: In Game 1 she was decent; in Game 2 she struggled. She was uncharacteristically careless with the ball and that was because her ankle was sore from playing Game 1 and she was off. Probably in hindsight, she shouldn't have been played. Like they did Whalen, we probably should have rested her. But she seems pretty good today and hopefully by game time tomorrow she will be good.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: She will play.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: It doesn't really make any difference. I just try to figure out who is playing well and have those five on the floor when the game is on the line. And it's like most of the games have been with Connecticut it will be the last two minutes.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: Play hard.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: I can see late in games, but when you have time to think about it and analyze it, our people are smart enough, and I'm sure theirs are, to analyze that it's a new ballgame each time you go on the floor. Sometimes during the game things get you down. We were tired; they were tired. We were the team that slept out of our own bed, traveled across the country; it may have affected us. But we, the end result is that we won one game and we were ahead with 8 seconds to go by three in the second one. So this is against the best record in the WNBA that we did that. So we've got to be happy.