Best 2712 quotes in «basketball quotes» category

The key is to maintain an evenness. Try to play one possession at a time, regardless of what happened on the last possession

The key to the fast break is every one running hard for their teammates.

The Lakers fans have been great, even folks in the supermarket are welcoming me back.

The last couple of practices, all we've been doing is a lot of defensive things. We've been going over some drills that make all of us have to communicate.

The Leftovers is a great basketball book that shines a light on what true competitors can overcome with a solid work ethic.

The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.

The key statistic is still to get to the foul line.

The key to coaching is not what you do, but the way you do it. The intangibles, the motivational parts of the game are the most important facets of it.

The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life - mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical.

The LA Lakers are so good they could run a fast break with a medicine ball.

The last five or six days, I've been running. The last two days, I've been running pretty hard. Everybody's got to be someplace.

The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

The main thing to do is relax and let your talent do the work.

The man above has given me some unbelievable abilities to play the game of basketball. I just try to take advantage of it every night. I got the trust of my teammates and my coaching staff to go in there and let it go.

The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.

The 'mecca of college basketball is in Storrs, Connecticut.

The mismatch is not what gets you beat. What gets you beat is giving up the uncontested, open shot.

The man who won't loan money isn't going to have many friends - or need them.

The more honor and self-respect among players, the greater the team.

The morale and the camaraderie that we had for one another earlier in the year is starting to come under duress because of all the losses. Some of the guys are feeling the pressure now from the last year when they were not successful.

The more concerned we become over the things we can't control, the less we will do with the things we can control

The more you lose, the more positive you have to become. When you're winning, you can ride players harder because their self-esteem is high. If you are losing and you try to be tough, you're asking for dissension.

The most important key to achieving great success is to decide upon your goal and launch, get started, take action, move.

The more your players have to think on the basketball court, the slower their feet get.

The more things we can get kids to do correctly off the court, the more they will do correctly on the court.

The most important quality I look for in a player is accountability. You've got to be accountable for who you are. It's too easy to blame things on someone else.

The most important thing in good leadership is truly caring.

The most important thing to me is the friends that I've made.

The most important thing is team morale.

The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was the most important thing of all.

The NBA is the strongest professional sports league in the world. The league and the game is bigger than any one person, Michael Jordan included, and they always will be. I hope that today players, especially our young players, continue to recognize that simple fact. Nothing is more important than the game itself and the fans who support it.

[The NBA] used to be a small band of basketball groupies. Now there are a lot more corporate-type people working in the league.

The NBA believes if you play for a team and get paid by a team, you're the property of that team for 24 hours a day.

The NBA is a big family, and I think of all these rookies as my brothers. I still believe I am blue collar among the All-Stars.

The NBA is all about winning, but at this level (college basketball) winning doesn't make you happy. You can win, and play lousy, and in my program, feel lousy. To me it's about: How good can we be.

The NBA (National Basketball Association) is never just a business. It's always business. It's always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal.

The NBA wasn't a big deal at that time, so it wasn't really in my career plans.

The NBA's chosen ones think I'm setting a bad example? I think they need to look around and stop taking themselves so seriously.

The next time I will cry is when I die. My life has been that beautiful.

The motivation for me is just the game itself, just playing the game the right way and trying to win, compete every time I step out there on the floor. That's motivation enough for me to go out there and play well.

The nicest thing about coaching is that one day you feel like you can play handball against a curb, and on other days you feel like you can fly to the moon.

[The movies] glamorize game day a little bit too much. It's such a focus. They miss a lot of the nuts and bolts, and the time that goes into the preparation each week, or each couple of days in basketball.

Then I went to UCLA - so of course I became a huge Bruin basketball fan... and later came to football.

The occasion is piled high with difficulty. We must rise to the occasion.

The night before my amputation, my former basketball coach brought me a magazine with an article on an amputee who ran in the New York Marathon. It was then I decided to meet this new challenge head on and not only overcome my disability, but conquer it in such a way that I could never look back and say it disabled me.

The one thing about basketball is that it continues to evolve and I love it so much. It does so much for me in my life. I've played on every level and I've been fortunate enough to be around greatness on every level.

The old lessons (work, self-discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, fighting to achieve) aren't being taught by many people other than football coaches these days. The football coach has a captive audience and can teach these lessons because the communication lines between himself and his players are more wide open than between kids and parents. We better teach these lessons or else the country's future population will be made up of a majority of crooks, drug addicts, or people on relief.

The Olympic Games is holy. Athletes from around the world, including myself, of course, dream to participate.

The one thing I do that nobody else does is jump three and four times for one rebound.