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A lot of times those things are shaped by coaches you work with, but other times they're shaped by coaches you admire and study.
You work hard and you drill daily all the habits that you need to win at basketball and you're going to create a winning culture.
You don't ever really wanna be let go from a job, but like anything that happens in life, you gotta make the best of your situation.
There's a lot of different ways to be successful in college basketball. Most of it stems from talent and having the ability to recruit.
You compete to win games, but the people that you meet and are able to help, develop and grow - that's the most rewarding part of this job.
Growing up in South Jersey, I have always been an Eagles fan. I don't paint my face or anything like that, but I deeply care about the team.
You coach your own system for so many years, that's all you ever know. To be able to step inside and see how others do it was very beneficial.
You reach for the stars and you work your butt off to achieve your dreams. If you fall short, you fall short, but you say you gave it your best.
Phil Jackson is a role model, and basically a coaching idol of mine. He's someone I really tried to model some of my coaching philosophies after.
It was larger than life - the 76ers, Dr. J, Moses Malone, Mo Cheeks, Andrew Toney and Bobby Jones - those were the teams that I grew up following.
Every great basketball team, every team that's on a championship journey takes steps each year, taking a step further than they were the year before.
The reason that I met my wife was because the lockout of '99. There were about six months where there was no film and no work and I had a social life.
I actually missed some assignments at Kentucky because my teachers were like, 'Didn't you check your e-mail?' I was like, 'I don't really know how to use e-mail.'
One of the hidden benefits of me being a student manager at Kentucky was me having the responsibility of driving Rick Pitino to his motivational speaking engagements.
From Game A to Game B, your whole focus is on improving your team and what is the next challenge. What does the next team present? What are the solutions to the puzzle?
Every player that I've ever been around that's worth a damn wants to be challenged and wants to be pushed, and wants to be coached hard, and wants to be held accountable.
If you commit to the defensive end of the floor, you're going to have a chance to win every night. And if you're a great defensive team, you're going to go to the playoffs.
I'm sort of an optimist, a high energy type of enthusiastic guy. Someone that tries to be genuine with the players, I'm not a guy that's going to come in and be a drill sergeant.
I thoroughly enjoy this profession and everything that goes into it - from improving your own guys and also the game-planning and studying the opponents. I enjoy that, I really do.
When we lose, watching a game tape is therapeutic for me because it brings clarity to what happened. And when we win it's fun and rewarding to see our guys do what we ask them to do.
I've always been of the mindset that relationships can be different and relationships can go bad with different people. That doesn't mean they're going to be a bad relationship with me.
Well, any teacher or coach derives his greatest pleasure in their profession or their process when they see their pupil succeed, so I would say I definitely enjoy that part of the game.
Focus on things you can control. Things that are out of control, you can't worry about what the result is going to be, you just focus on trying to do the best in your situation that you can.
Paul George is just a gifted guy that has versatility that no one else in the league has - in terms of playing ones, twos of threes, and really just blanket another team's top perimeter scorer.
I was just thankful to be a student manager, and if that led to a high school coaching job or maybe I could stick at a small Division I school as an assistant, that would have been a success for me.
I really think your roster and your personnel dictates your style of play. When you have David West and Roy Hibbert does it make sense to play spread pick-and-roll game when you have those abilities inside?
There are a lot of 7-footers that aren't good shot blockers whether it's their athleticism, their quick jump, their eye-hand coordination, their ability to get their hands on the ball. Part of it is just instinctual.
You spend your entire time 24 hours a day thinking about when is the next game, and you put together the plan and that's a lot of fun. When the game's ready to go, it's just exciting to see how all your studying is going to pay off.
Being able to step away from your work is big. Not even the actual work of sitting down and looking at game tape, but actually putting your job aside and focusing on other things. That's a big part of being successful in this league.
I did feel support right from the start from LeBron. He's always shown me a great deal of respect dating back to our battles when I was in Indiana and competing with the Heat in the conference finals, and coaching him in the All-Star Game.
I've got a lot of belief in Aaron Gordon and he's one of the reasons that I took the job here with the Magic. When a guy cares as much as he does and works as hard as he does, that impacts the group. And that type of attitude is infectious.
The value in having bigs that have the ability to shoot from the perimeter has increased and having bigs that have the defensive versatility to not only protect the rim, but to switch out and defend smaller guards, the value of that has also increased.
I graduated in biology by overcoming an incredibly impossible science workload in college. The knowledge does nothing for me, but knowing I achieved that makes me feel like I can achieve anything because those science classes in biology are just impossible.
I've got a lot of coaching friends in the business, in basketball and in other sports, that really when you talk about choosing jobs, you want to make sure that you have a strong ownership group and the reputation of the DeVos family is as good as it goods.
When you have your roster set up different ways, you really just have to examine the roster, find out what their strengths and weakness are and hopefully you take your roster and the vision you want to implement of how you want to play and you can tweak your roster to create that.
I think there's a danger in letting someone else shape how you're going to approach a player. Every person has somebody who's going to say something negative about them, you know? If you pay attention to all that stuff instead of seeing it for your own eyes, you can miss out on some opportunities.
I was at a basketball camp when I was a kid and the lecturer used basketball spinning to teach us a lesson on never being satisfied with what you've accomplished. The lecturer talked about how the game of basketball was about learning to control the ball through dribbling and passing and shooting.
The film room teaches you how to do the job, how to study the game, how to teach the game from film. How to create an advantage for your team by knowing your opponent, and all their plays and tendencies. And there's no better guy in the world that I've been around than Jim O'Brien at breaking down film.
I was playing division three basketball and I wanted to find a way to work in basketball full-time. The way to do that was not in division three right away; you'd have to be a part-time assistant or whatever. So, I made the decision to transfer to Kentucky. Just so I could get my feet wet and maybe get a job in D-1.
To have the ability to not have to change your lineup every night - if you're playing a big team, you don't have to take your smalls out; and if you are playing a small team, you don't have to pull your bigs. When you have bigs who are versatile and can play both styles then you can stay true to who you are every night.
This is a very stressful profession. Not just coaching, but head coaching at this level with all of the variables that you have on your mind 24/7, it does take a toll on your health and you have to be very cognizant about what's going on with your body and listen to your body and make sure that you take care of your body.
When you have the confidence that you can go four, five, six possessions where you're just squeezing the other team's offense, getting stops, and then with our ability to run the floor, with LeBron James being the quarterback of that action and being in attack mode, we have a strong belief in what we can accomplish as a group.