WNBA FINALS: MONARCHS v SUN

September 14, 2005

Mike Thibault

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: The open opening statement I have is it was a great basketball game. It was pretty even most of the way, but the difference for me is obvious, turnovers. We had control of the game for a while and we gave it back. We had 15 turnovers and they had seven, and 17-8 in turnover points. And everything else was basically even. You know, I'm not quite sure how they can play the style they play and get called for only ten fouls, but, you know, we need to do a little better job tomorrow moving the basketball and not giving them the gifts. I mean, turnovers are gift points and we can't do that tomorrow.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: I have no idea until tomorrow. We'll see how it reacts to today, whether it swells up. We'll see.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: I think everybody when they get to this point in the season is a gutsy player. The most impressive part is that she played 25 minutes without a turnover. She struggled a little bit with her shooting. You know, she did a lot of other good things. I mean, considering where we were 24 hours ago and 48 hours ago, I'm very happy with that part of it. It was what we've come to expect, I think.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: You know, I want to see the tape before I comment on some of it. I thought Margo did a good job on her early in the game but she got a stretch there in the second half either between cutting down the lane and getting a pass from somebody else or getting an offensive rebound, she gets the lay-up down the stretch, that we didn't keep her outside the lane. You know, she turned it on. She's got that will right now to go and try to win a championship just like everybody else, and you can see how possessed she is at playing. I thought we'd did a good job early and broke down late. We came in different ways. It's not all in Margo's match-up or Asjha's matchup; it's a team thing and we didn't do it as a team on her.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: No. We've been shooting 45 percent for the season.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: No, we've been shooting 45, 46 percent. I mean, that's about what we shot tonight. We just didn't sustain it. It kind of came in spurts. We were on target to do what we needed to do. It's just when you end up with Sacramento shooting 67 field goal attempts and we shot 56 -- basketball becomes very black and white to me a lot of times. There's not a lot of gray area in some areas, and turnovers was very specific to me. The game was lost by turning the ball over.