WNBA FINALS: MONARCHS v SUN

September 20, 2005

Mike Thibault

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: My only statement is congratulations Sacramento Coach Whisenant and his staff and players. They did a great job. They had a terrific year. They have what we wanted. And it's hard to take. They played well. I don't think either team played great offensively, but both teams played great effort-wise. I thought we left too many points out on the floor in the first half. We had a chance to pull away and get up 12 or 14 and it ends up being a six-point game at half time. And we missed too many shots. And our starters shot 27 percent for the game. So, it's hard to win a big playoff game when that happens.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: I don't know, they stopped scoring for a couple minutes and we got a couple transition baskets. We made a big shot in the corner. Then Jamie hit Taj for that layup. I think that was the one that cut it to two, maybe. Then they got three possessions at the other end on the next one, the ball tipped out of bounds. One went off Jamie, I think, one went off somebody else out of bounds and they kept getting it back, and if we could have got a stop on one of those I thought we would have a little momentum to get over the top. As it turns out, we had to fight back again and get in the hole down four again. We have a very persistent persevering team here. But we didn't make shots when we needed to tonight. We missed too many easy shots. I don't think we got any breaks, but we also got to make our shots, too, that we got.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: It was drawn up for her but we didn't execute it very well. We didn't get the screen we wanted on it. So she had to kind of go force what we were doing a little bit. I still felt good, actually, when she caught it I thought that she would probably get a good look. But she got a little off balance and it wasn't the look we wanted. I thought we would get a better shot.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: Well, he gets them to buy into his system and it's hard to get a lot of players to buy into. To play in a full-denial position for an entire season for 40 minutes a night is a hard thing to do. I think what he's done best, and not demeaning the coaching part of it, but he's done kind of like we did, some couple other teams did: He saw what kind of a team he wanted to have and went out and got the players to fit his system. It takes -- it's a little bit of a process, it's a couple year process. Make some trades, get some draft picks. He drafted kids that fit what he wanted to do. And then got them to buy in. They're very athletic, they're unselfish. I commend he and whoever else in the organization was responsible for forming the philosophy and the personnel that went together to fit that philosophy. I think that's great, when you have a belief in something, you have to stick to it, and I think that they should be commended first for that.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: It was a disaster is what it was.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: You saw some crazy things happen. I have never seen a game, I don't think, where you're inbounding the ball and have you a hurt player on the floor rolling over while one of our players was trying to inbound it, and the ball goes flying out of bounds. That, along with the -- we had a turnover to start the half. I think Margo was trying to hit Taj underneath. We lost somebody and they had hit a jumpshot. And then we turned it over again. That was huge momentum swing. All of a sudden we're up one in the space of less than two minutes. That's hard to overcome sometimes the momentum swing. We should have been able to try to at least play even for a minute or two and then get another run. Instead we gave them a run right away to start the half.

COACH MIKE THIBAULT: I don't know yet. We're talking about 20 minutes after an emotional game. That's something that our staff and everybody will have to sit down and try to figure out over the next month or so before the expansion draft who we protect, and what we need to do to get better. The fact that we're in the Finals two years in a row is a great thing. We put ourselves in a tough position in this series losing Game 1. I think we're every bit as talented as Sacramento. But they made their breaks for themselves tonight and I can't comment on the other stuff that happened. As far as assessing what we need to do in the future, I think we need to keep kind of doing what we have done. We have some young players that we have been building around. One of them is Lindsay Whalen. We didn't have her a hundred percent for the series. So I would like to think that maybe we would have been able to play a little bit different in this series. But Sacramento got up on whoever played that position and played them. I just, I don't want to make any comments about the future of this team. The good is we have been here twice and now we have to figure out away to get over the hump.