WNBA FINALS: MONARCHS v SUN

September 17, 2005

Kara Lawson

KARA LAWSON: Oh, we're real confident. To be able to come back home to ARCO, where we're a team that's tough to beat, we feed off the energy from our crowd. It's a tough loss in Game 2 for us, but when we looked at the big picture and saw that we went in there and didn't play our best ball by any means in two games and were able to get one and darn near got two, we're pretty happy with the road trip and we have an opportunity now to get Game 3 at home and put a lot of pressure on them for Game 4. So that's kind of our attitude and we're just excited to be back here. Our coach told us before practice today, "If you had told us April that we would be 1-1 with the home-court advantage in a three-game series, which it is now, would you have skipped the season and taken it?" And we all said, yeah, we would have taken it. So, yeah, this is a place where we want to be. We're in a good position we feel like and now it's just up to us to take advantage of it on the court.

KARA LAWSON: No, no. That's one of the things about our team is that we don't lose games and try to redefine ourselves or try to look for a new identity. Our identity stays the same. We just have to do what we do better. Game 2, we didn't have a lot of energy, especially on the defensive end. They did a good job of attacking us in transition, attacking us on the inside. Getting it down to Taj early and often in the game. So you could credit whatever, you could credit their adjustments from Game 1 to Game 2, you could credit that it was a back-to-back and we were on the road, you could say a lot of things, but the bottom line is that we didn't have enough energy to make our defense work and be effective. So having two days off in between games, getting back to our home court, which we're familiar with, we're hopeful we can bring that energy in Game 3.

KARA LAWSON: Unbelievable. Something like that, the WNBA Finals has never seen, because it's never been to ARCO. And people know how crazy it gets for the Kings, so it will be crazy here at ARCO tomorrow.