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Experience is everything. It means so much because it enabled me to learn the game even faster. Playing in the playoffs is the best basketball in the world, and if you can learn under that pressure, succeed under that pressure, it gives you more confidence the next year.
Oct 1, 2025
How good can we expect to be if our best player is not our best teammate
A key basketball skill is imagery. The best players "see" situations before they happen so they can be prepared
Pressure can burst a pipe, or pressure can make a diamond.
Practice habits were crucial to my development in basketball. I didn't play against the toughest competition in high school, but one reason I was able to do well in college was that I mastered the fundamentals. You've got to have them down before you can even think about playing.
Play the game with a smile.
I wanted to do two things when I was growing up, about your age. I wanted to play in the NBA, and I wanted to be a businessman after my basketball career was over, and that is what I am doing now.
John Stockton is one of the true marvels, not just of basketball, or in America, but in the history of Western Civilization!
If the NBA were on channel 5 and a bunch of frogs making love were on channel 4, I'd watch the frogs, even if they were coming in fuzzy.
You can't win unless you learn how to lose.
The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.
Scientists contribute in a variety of ways and I don't think I can singular one even including [Albert] Einstein, that I can say that he's the best. We don't work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort.
If I weren't earning $3 million a year to dunk a basketball, most people on the street would run in the other direction if they saw me coming.
As far as carrying the torch for the years to come, I don't know. I just want to be the best basketball player I can be.
Even when I'm old and grey, I won't be able to play it, but I'll still love the game.
All kids need is a little help, a little hope and somebody who believes in them.
I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home, it starts with the parental influence.
You always have to give 100%,because if you don't someone, somewhere will give 100% and they will beat you when you meet.
It's not how big you are, it's how big you play.
Once you are labeled 'the best' you want to stay up there, and you can't do it by loafing around.
Sometimes a player's greatest challenge is coming to grips with his role on the team.
They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they'd make up their minds.
The only way you're going to get through life, happily, is being yourself.
This is a team game and one man doesn't win and one man doesn't lose. In the end, the best team usually wins.
Failure is good. It's fertilizer. Everything I've learned about coaching I've learned from making mistakes.
Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful at anything you put your mind to
Everyting negative - pressure, challenges - is all an opportunity for me to rise.
If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball.
If my primary purpose here at Indiana is to go out and win ballgames, I can probably do that as well as anybody can. I would just cheat, get some money from a lot of people around Indianapolis who want to run the operation that way, and just go out and get the best basketball players I can. Then we'd beat everybody.
Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.
Be strong in body, clean in mind, lofty in ideals.
If you make every game a life and death proposition, you're going to have problems. For one thing, you'll be dead a lot.
When I was young, I never wanted to leave the court until I got things exactly correct. My dream was to become a pro.
One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.
You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.
What to do with a mistake: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it.
One man cannot make a team.
I've had the privilege of coaching the best basketball team in the history of the world, and that's the USA national team. I've had a chance to coach them for eight years. If you were to ask me if I could end my career only coaching one team for the rest of my coaching career, I don't think it could get better than that, especially with the players that I've had during those eight years. When you've coached at that level, you know, you've coached those players, it's pretty hard to say, I would rather coach anybody else.
Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
If you are afraid of failure, you don't deserve success.
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation.
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.
Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.
Good, Better, Best. Never let it rest. Until your Good is Better, and your Better is your Best.
I think it is an accurate statement to say that some people consider feelings of same-gender attraction to be the defining fact of their existence. There are also people who consider the defining fact of their existence that they are from Texas or that they were in the United States Marines. Or they are red-headed, or they are the best basketball player that ever played for such-and-such a high school. People can adopt a characteristic as the defining example of their existence and often those characteristics are physical.
A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals.
Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.
I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.
I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.