Flip Saunders Backed Down, Blatche Started

Flip demonstrated last night why many around the L don’t feel he’s a very strong personality. The WaPo has Blatche’s rather hilarious reaction to Saunders’ criticism, and his quick return into the coach’s good graces: “Coach Flip Saunders missed the team meeting on Wednesday with a migraine headache, so he was unable to hear what Andray Blatche had to tell his teammates the morning after Saunders’s scathing assessment of his behavior against Charlotte. Saunders said that Blatche essentially quit on his team for refusing to speak with him after he was benched late in the first quarter. After the game, Saunders said that it was ‘unlikely’ that Blatche would play, but he announced about 90 minutes before tipoff addressed his other headache by stating that Blatche not only was going to play, but he would start against the Pacers. ‘He’s going to start,’ Saunders said. ‘As I told him, when he came out of the game, it was a situation that if he wanted to go back in the game he had to talk to me, accept coaching. We talked about the situation, he didn’t want to talk during the game about it, so he didn’t play. We talked. It’s over with. You move forward.’ When someone mentioned to Blatche before the game that he was going to start, Blatche said, ‘I wonder why.’ He said he never worried about not playing. ‘I wasn’t worried at all,’ Blatche said. ‘I didn’t do nothing wrong, so I didn’t have anything to worry about. It was a situation that occurred. It should die down within time. Most important thing right now is to try to get a win.’ Earlier in the day, Blatche said that Saunders’s critique after the game was “not true.” Saunders refused to go back at him.”