2011 Finals Game 3 Quotes: Lynx win the championship

Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve

On Taj McWilliams-Franklin

The reason we signed Taj is because she is so steady. It’s probably wise not to run your 40 year old into the ground, she is steady. Her impact on this team…I don’t remember a signing in an off-season that affected a team as much as she affected ours in a positive way….I just felt like Taj was so instrumental in this season.

Lynx’s Seimone Augustus

On scoring in the finals

This is what I do. This year we have had an amazing team. I haven’t had to score as many points as many years before, and I was able to get my teammates involved, and I think we had three or four people that averaged double figures this year, so I just never had to score as much as I did in the Finals.

On the emotions of winning the title

I’m thankful, thankful that everything worked out well, I was able to recover from the ACL injury and the fibroids, the team stuck with me throughout the years, I was in my contract year when I was going through the ACL injury and it was great to know that they were with me and I was going to fight to get back on the court and do whatever I had to do to help this team go wherever we needed to go. They did a great job of bringing in Coach Reeve, and they made a great decision with the draft picks, we got Maya, we got Amber, ya know, Candice Wiggins hung around with us, Charde hung around, we got Rebekkah, Taj came in, in free agency, it’s a masterpiece, it came together well.

On what the title means for Minneapolis

I didn’t know they hadn’t won a championship within 20 years so it definitely gives the people of Minnesota something to smile about, something to be happy about until the Vikings and the rest of the teams there get on track. This is a very bright moment for the fans there and for us. We’re still fightin’ to get the exposure that we need for women’s basketball and it’s here, I think we have arrived as far as Minnesota is concerned, people paying attention.

On what’s next

Celebrate the title! That’s what’s next, we celebrate right now, we don’t focus on next year until it comes around. Right now we’re celebrating this championship that we earned and deserved.

Lynx’s Maya Moore

On Seimone Augustus

I think Seimone this year just — she is so confident in her game and she is one of those players that can go out and play so well, play so hard on both ends, but make everybody else feel like they’re playing well at the same time. She is one of those players that we all feed off of, we all want to see succeed and we all want to play hard for.

Dream head coach Marynell Meadors

On what she told her team post-game

You know, we — we fought hard. We fought hard all year long. We went through so much adversity from the beginning of the season till the end. You know, we just — I appreciate their effort, I appreciated everything that they have given to this Atlanta organization. They played as hard as they could, I think we just ran out.

We were not supposed to even get into the playoffs, the way we started and then we were not supposed to win the playoffs, but we did, and then we got to this moment and we went up against an outstanding basketball team. Minnesota Lynx, congratulations to them, they have an awesome team, they have great depth and they’re big and physical and I think it takes a lot out of a smaller team like we are.

On what went wrong and the future of her team

There is a lot of fight in this team, I can tell you that, and they know what it’s all about to be in Championship games and to me I thought Minnesota did what they needed to do. We didn’t hit our free-throws and our easy shots, had we done that we might have been sitting here as winners, but we did not do it. We have to figure out what we have to work on between now and next year and we only have a couple of days because the players are taking off to Europe, so we try to close out the season as fast as we can, so they get a little rest before they have to report to the European countries.

Dream’s Lindsey Harding

On leaving Washington and coming to Atlanta

The plan was to come and play for a championship. When Atlanta was talking to me at the time before I was traded here, it was, you know, we want to get to the Finals again and compete for a championship. It was their mind-set, it wasn’t oh we want a good season and play in the playoffs, no, we wanted to get to this point.

I knew it was hard, playing in D.C. was the first time I had gone to the playoffs, period. It’s good to be here and when you think about how we started from 3-9 to come to where we are now, we weren’t supposed to be here and we fought through it.