WNBA FINALS: MONARCHS v SUN

September 18, 2005

Mike Thibault

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: I guess I'm not a very good prognosticator because I thought we would play our best game in the series today and we played our worst. You don't win any games when you give them 20 points on turnovers and 16 points on offensive rebounds and you hold them to 37 percent from the floor. You don't win. So that's it, as simple as I can put it. Questions?

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: Well, we go to the gym tomorrow, we get a little stretch and get a little shooting in and we'll try not to turn it over by ourselves and then we're just getting ready for Tuesday's game. That's why it's a five-game series. We played like this kind of in Game 1 and we came back and bounced back the other night. I was encouraged by how we bounced back in the second half and got it back to a game. It's disappointing we didn't get the foul called when Taj went, that's disappointing. But, you know, we had a chance. We gave ourselves a chance at the end, even though as badly as we played we had a chance. And then we ended up having a foul, the score difference is the fouling at the end. But when have you a two-point game after you've played as poorly as you did for a stretch, that part of it was actually encouraging. So we'll be ready to play Tuesday.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: Well, the offense going cold is a matter of Jamie missing a layup, Taj getting fouled and not getting the free throw line. Kesh missed a shot in there somewhere. I don't remember the sequence. We had chances. I don't know that it necessarily went cold. I guess missing a layup is missing a layup, but it wasn't the offense. It was just a basket that didn't go in. And I felt we should have been at the free throw line, so...

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: That was my decision. We weren't playing real well. We played well with other players in there today. She struggled a little bit, she turned the ball over. It's hard having not played in the series that much. To have that pressure and not be able to go full strength, I just felt we needed to put somebody who had played the other night and played well and healthy, and Jen and Jamie, and see what happened. And they got us back in the game, and so I stuck with it. If it had been different and they didn't do any better, I might have put her back in. But we had a chance to win with the group that was in the game.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: Well, basically I wrote the stats on the board is what I wrote. I wrote that we only forced seven turnovers and got no points out of it. They forced 16 and got 20. They got 16 points on the offensive boards and we got seven. We missed nine of 19 free throws, and we shot a better percentage than them. And I let them stare at it for a little bit. That's not X's and O's, that's block-outs, loose balls, bad passes, that is all it is.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: Well, they're disruptive but by this point in the series we should be able to better handle it. We did a good job the other night of not throwing it away. I think that at least 60 percent of our turnovers tonight were us. Carelessness. You can't have the kind of errors we had. Amongst our starters we had 13 turnovers. And that doesn't win. And some of it is them getting up and being active but some of it is us just making bad plays. And I wish I could sugarcoat it, but I can't.