Phil Jackson Quotes
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He is still a long ways from being smooth in what we anticipate will be a system that he'll take to and enjoy, ... It's going to take him a while, as it will everybody, especially a guy who's a lead guard in a situation like that. It takes some time.
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Come back. Join us when you're ready and we're ready to go on with you -- or without you.
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We had a blowout in the third quarter and we never recovered from it. Give them credit Mobley and Brand were productive players out there.
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Coaching is salesmanship. Coaching is winning players over and convincing them they have to play together. It takes a team conviction to play together to make things work.
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I'll just say that hopefully they've drained the mud out of the building, and the termites aren't going to eat the buildings away in between the time we get down there. They made a good judgment probably to get this back in, and that's the important thing about it.
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Tracy looks like he's injured to me. He just didn't seem to play with as much vigor.
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It was a really nice game. He did a lot of things well for us tonight. He has been saying he has been getting more comfortable playing in the offense. We asked him to do a variety of things, and that sparked his game tonight. His rebounding has been a great asset for us.
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I didn't want to create an impediment in that situation. I wanted him to be productive. But it didn't seem to be working in that direction. I think more attention was better than less.
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I'm not going to weigh in on that one. I think that water is a little deep. I think that he measures himself against a season. I've always given him credit for that and he knows what the end-goal is. He's got a tremendous amount of pride and I anticipate that's a process that he's going through. He'll be there when playoffs are going and he'll probably be at his peak at that time.
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My mother's families were Mennonites or Anabaptists that came to Minnesota from Russia. They were actually moving around Europe doing diking and lowland reclamation work, and they moved into Minnesota.
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I think some of our guys hit a little bit of a wall here. We talked a lot about that ... This is a heavy time to play basketball. You've really got to take care of yourself. I had a couple of guys fighting through things out there, under-the-weather type of things. They just couldn't get themselves going.
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We slept almost all the way through the third quarter. We're just not able to play a full game.
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I thought it was vindictive. I don't like to see it because he's one of the guys that we nurtured here. He was contributing to us a lot in the championship (run) two years ago.
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We need to try to regain some home-court advantage.
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I wonder if they ever are. I thought they might let that go this year, but it didn't seem apparent at all. Right away, he got booed. He just may be one of those guys that has to carry that for a year or two until another group comes along that gives him a break.
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That's not unusual for a player to lose concentration if certain phases of the game go wrong for him. He put some pressure on himself to score. All players want to score as a part of their game. . . . I don't know where his confidence is. You either have it or you don't have it. It doesn't reside in your jockstrap or your brain. His confidence should be in his defense. That's where he plays and rebounds and hustles for us.
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I told Kobe that's the one area where I'll try not to disclose.
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We remind our players that this is something that was a special night in a heated situation but it's not going to be a steady diet for us. The onus on Kobe is to stay inside the team offense. The onus on the players is to pick it up a little bit better.
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They almost made me get up and walk out of the building in the third quarter. They got it righted and played good defense to get back in the game. I knew that Kobe would find a way out there to help us win.
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I felt at some times Kobe might have taken advantage of our flexibility.
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I don't mean to say that as a snide remark toward a certain population in our society, ... But they have a limitation of their attention span, a lot of it probably due to too much rap music going in their ears and coming out their being. So they need to get a focal point that lasts longer than a TV commercial or one short 15-second span.
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I wouldn't ask him to go on the trip. We want him to stay behind, work out and get an opportunity to condition himself. It makes no sense for him to go along on the trip and stay in the hotel while we play.
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My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that - well, my father's family came as Puritans to Massachusetts.
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I'm going to address the team and try to set down some parameters as to how we're going to deal with it, ... This is something now that we seriously have to take as another type of an issue, where there's a certain sense of where our privacy lies and where the boundaries lie, that we're going to have to address and we're going to have to be serious about it.