I have always maintained that in basketball the importance of the mental to the physical is about four to one.
I don’t have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb.
I’ve never felt my job was to win basketball games – rather, that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life.
Basketball is a full court game, so every drill must be done full court.
I just love the game of basketball so much. The game! I don’t need the 18,000 people screaming and all the peripheral things. To me, the most enjoyable part is the practice and preparation.
The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
I think that to stop an offense, you must go to the heart of that offense. If it is a particular move, a screen, the break, an outstanding scorer, whatever it is that they like to do and rely on, you have to work in your plans on taking that completely or as much as possible away from them.
Do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done the best way it can be done, and do it that way every time.
I, fortunately, have never worried about irritating people.
Offense is not equal opportunity.
Perform drills that force your players to think.
Learn to do things right and then do them right every time.
A quick way for any player to make himself better is to think about what he himself doesn’t like to play against.
Well, I think it’s pretty much established that I just didn’t have any interest in coaching in the pros.
Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try is in it own way success.
Practice structure determines success.
The structure of your practice is the main reason for your success or lack of success as a coach.
Pat has been instrumental in what we’ve done here so far and the most selfish thing for me is that I want to see what we’ve done placed in the hands of the most competent person, and that’s Pat. No one would come close to being able to continue to build on what we’ve done here so far like he will.
I recognize that I have a problem with my temper. For those times it has ever caused me to do anything that gave anyone understandable and justifiable reason to be upset, I am sincerely sorry.
This is like the town council just hired a new marshal to clean up the town, I guarantee you, if I stay here long enough, they’ll get rid of me, too.