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There needs to be a dialogue between coaches, fans, players and administrators to promote positivity in the stands.
At the end of every season I look in the mirror and ask myself what can I do better? Where did I screw up this year?
I feel like I'm a guy who consistently makes the right play and the right reads offensively and that helps my teammates.
Generally speaking, you want to put three or four shooters around a dominant center and have him just roll to the basket.
Our job collectively, players and coaches, is to figure out a way to play that we can put ourselves in a position to win.
I think it's important to have open lines of communication and I think the best lines of communication are two-way lines.
I think the coach-player relationship is a two-way thing. You have to be willing to take suggestions as a player and vice versa.
I'm not naive - I think it's rare in the NBA every day to actually be able to enjoy being around the people you're working with.
As I finished up my time at Duke, I certainly wasn't a 'foodie' but I was learning to enjoy the finer things in the culinary world.
For the most part, someone who is in love with mechanical watches is not going to decide to wear a smartwatch over a mechanical watch.
I don't care about starting or coming off the bench or anything like that. To me, whatever role I'm in I'm going to try to help us win.
I listen to a lot of hip hop artists, and I think hip hop and poetry go hand in hand. The 'Def Jam Poetry' on HBO is just so sick to me.
I don't own a watch anymore. Literally, that was an addiction. I'm not afraid to admit that. It took me over. My possessions possessed me.
I feel like when I look back at my career I've always done better and I've always been happier when there's more expectation and more pressure.
I'm a Christopher Nolan fiend. I love 'Inception,' 'Interstellar,' 'The Prestige,' 'Memento' and of course the Batman trilogy. I love all his movies.
To use a phrase that I don't often use, the NBA is very much a woke league. It's at the forefront of a lot of things - training, fashion, food, diet.
When I was at Duke, I finally had an avocado - accidentally - on a turkey sandwich. I was hooked. Next thing I know, I couldn't get enough guacamole.
I was never a very adventurous eater growing up, despite the fact that my mother is a nutritionist and my parents have always had a garden in our yard.
I feel like every guy has a job to do on the defensive end, and that job can change night to night. My biggest thing is, I try to do my job, and compete.
Obviously, you look at a situation and you say, 'What do I need to do to fit in?' I looked at the Clippers and said, 'I really need to work on my dunk shots.'
I'm very proud of my time at Duke, my career at Duke, but as you get older and become an adult, you lose some head bobs. That's not part of the routine anymore.
New Orleans has an incredible culture. Everybody brings up food first, but I realized there's a lot more to that in terms of music and art and people and history.
As we grow up and we're developing, our ego needs to be contained, otherwise we'd all be selfish two- and three-year-olds, screaming every time we didn't get our way.
As a U.S. History major, there is something very cool about being in cities, and walking the streets of Philadelphia or Boston or New York and seeing historical sites.
I played ACC and NCAA Tournament games in my backyard - these imaginary games - and when I finally got to experience it in real life, it was better than I could imagine.
I think anytime you have expectations for your team and for yourself and you have goals that you want to accomplish you can't overlook the small stuff and the baby steps.
As late as my junior year, I was taking Italian at Duke because I thought I was going to have to go overseas and play. Then I had a great senior year and became a lottery pick.
For me, I spent four years at Duke, and I was 22 my rookie year. For a lot of guys, I was old as a rookie, but nothing could prepare me for the NBA, both on the court and off the court.
I'm no dummy. So much of the NBA is just fit and situation, and I always say this, for 85 to 90 percent of the league, your performance is often dictated by your situation and your coaches.
You want your kids to grow up in a world that's better than the one you grew up in. I'm not talking about my own family's wealth. I'm talking about the actual world and all the issues that we have.
I like to write, I like to reflect, and not just poetry, I like to write my thoughts down. I think it's good for people who are more introspective, and it helps me get a better understanding of myself.
Tattoos are a thing I've never really planned out. They just kind of happen spontaneously, on a whim. It's kind of like curating a watch collection, it just kind of happens. I like it to happen organically.
I know when I was a kid, I looked up to athletes. So, if an athlete spoke out on an important issue, then I was probably more likely to hear that opinion and to see that stance and recognize the importance of that.
Kind of making that leap from a team that wins occasionally to a team that wins the majority of the time, a lot of times just comes down with figuring out how tough it is to win, and then executing down the stretch to do it.
We're going to have a generation of kids whose norm will be people just being addicted to their phones. And that's what scares me. The impact on my kids, I think about that daily. Like, what is this doing to me and my family?
I didn't like the way I shot the ball in Milwaukee, so I worked really hard on my shooting - threes off the move and off the catch. And also continued to work on my ball-handling and my in-between game - my runners and floaters.
Growing up, I didn't know anyone that was a watch collector or into watches, but I was always kind of curious about them. Before the NBA Draft, I knew I was going to get drafted, and I wanted to commemorate that by buying a watch.
My parents always wanted me to do the right thing. My mom, I think her exact words were, 'You're not a chicken in the coop playing in the scraps, you're an eagle.' I was like, 'Oh, OK... ' But really, I've used that throughout my life.
There's certain points in the season - I think players go through it and teams go through it - where you just have stretches and you're stuck in a rut or you feel like nothing's going right. You just got to keep grinding, and eventually it'll turn.
I feel so fortunate to have great coaching. Coaches that have taught me great habits and taught me great things about basketball and life, but I've always played for coaches who have held me accountable and that's made me a better player and person.
I hate to admit it, but anytime you're at a stoplight and your phone is within reach? You pick it up. It's become instinctual. Even if you put the phone down and walk out of the room, you're always aware of where it is. It's become an extension of you.
I think anytime you have any sort of injury, you know I've come back from a pulled hamstring in college one time, foot injuries. The movement that causes the initial jolt of pain you always kind of are tentative when you have to make that movement, especially as you kind of build back up.
I think with defense especially, you have your core principles. If you do those consistently, then it's easy to make, sort of, game-to-game adjustments. But, when you're not doing your core principles consistently, you end up just guessing a lot. To be honest with you, that's what bad teams do.
I always talk about shooting being broken down into three things. You have to have some semblance of good form. The second part is repetition: doing things over and over again until you really develop a skillset. And then the third part is confidence. But for me, you can't have confidence without having that second part.
As you progress as a basketball player, the world around you becomes more and more chaotic. There's more talent, there are more distractions - and these are all factors that create a lack of control. By having a routine, by having habits that I can fall back on, it's my way of enacting control. It's the only thing I can control.
I think my confidence and competitiveness - that will - comes from my mother. I always knew my mom loved me, and she always made me feel like I was - I don't want to say 'special' - but that I was capable of doing things. Before I ever shot a basketball or before I ever threw a baseball, I had confidence, and that was from my mother.
I've never valued material things. I've always been more attached to people. The pursuit of material things takes time, and I realized my time is very valuable especially during the season. My time with my kids, what I do to take care of my body, and of course any intellectual pursuits I may have on the side. Those are all things that I value.