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Chemistry kind of builds all season. It's not like we say, 'OK, it's game one, and now we've got our chemistry.' I think it shifts and moves all season long.
I know, when I'm walking out on the court before for the game, it's like, man, if you wanna compete, here it is. It's coming. That's something I really enjoy.
I want to see given extra effort, pulling for your teammates: those are the kinds of things we're shooting for and we're going for because that's what we need.
An entrepreneur will do whatever they have to do to make sure things get done. Our coaches will be that way; our players will be that way. Just do what it takes.
I understand there are bumps in the road. I understand there's a lot of noise that I don't want to listen to, and I just try to do my job to the best of my ability.
I've known Adrian Griffin for quite awhile now and always had him as my 'when I get a job, I want to hire him if he isn't already a head coach and I can get him' list.
As an assistant, when you wake up in the morning, you're opening your laptop and watching film. Then the game starts, and you're watching it until you finally fall asleep.
Why are people afraid to try something different? Because of the scrutiny they're going to receive if it doesn't work. That stops people from trying things different a lot.
Hindsight is, of course, 20/20. Any time you go back, and you look at something, and now you've got the result of something, you say, 'Yeah, maybe it wasn't the right idea.'
That's playoff basketball. Can you not get too happy after a win? Can you understand how determined the team is going to be after a loss and bring the energy you need to bring?
For every philosophical idea about how we're going to do things, there has to be a plan to get there, and we have to be able to execute it, first in practice and then in games.
My goal early in becoming a head coach so young was to find out if I could do it. I just wanted to see if I could be a good head coach and then start learning from head coaching.
I said it when I got hired. I said, for five years, I had a 1,000 people telling me I was going to be a head coach in the NBA. And when I got the job, those same 1,000 people were shocked.
I don't think when I decided I didn't want to be an accountant any more that I was necessarily saying I wanted to be an NBA head coach. I just really wanted to figure out if I could do it.
I know the 'big spending club v. smaller club' theme is popular in the Premier League. I don't think about it - we are 30 teams trying to win the championship, and you do what you need to do.
I think I jumped the gun a bit on head coaching. I got named a head coach at 23, and I really didn't know what I was doing. I remember getting that job and going, 'Oh my God, they gave me the job.'
You look at any roster and you say, 'Geez, he's pretty good. He's pretty good. He's talented. He comes off the bench?' All of a sudden, it's, 'Geez, that's a pretty good roster they got right there.'
Football is a pretty complex numbering system most of the time: run the three back through the four hole, things like that. We kind of do the same thing - the three man sets for the four, or whatever.
I've coached a lot of teams and moved up gradually and tried to succeed and tried to have success at every level. When that happens, you just continue to wonder if you can keep doing it one more level.
I didn't think reaching the NBA was a possibility when I coached Derby in 1990. I was right out of college when I went there and was more concerned about playing a bit and getting that out of my system.
I place a lot of value on pace of the game, going after people... always be the aggressor and forcing the issue a little bit when we have the ball, and when we don't have it, we want to come at you, too.
I call Kawhi the best team player in the league. He really does everything: he defends. He scores. He has been grabbing huge rebounds. He is a leader. His competitive spirit to win rubs off on everybody.
It used to be every single time you got the rebound, you handed it to the point guard, or you outlet it to the point guard, or everyone cleared, and you waited until the point guard brought the ball up the floor.
People talk about offensive chemistry all the time, but defensive chemistry is something you have to build, too, and there's a lot of that work to be done with just communications and the feel of who certain guys play.
I was in love with the triangle because it was so different to what everybody was doing in the NBA. Everybody else was dribbling down, throwing it into the low post, and then their guy would go to work. To me, it was boring.
Obviously, things evolve; teams see you play a little bit and start try to do things, and the one thing that'll happen is if one team has success in something, you can bet the next three teams are doing some similar things, too.
I think it's really important that we get an experienced staff. Guys that have been a head coach, to me, at some level is important to me. I value head coaching just because it's good to know what it's like to be the decision maker.
Fifty-nine or 54 or 52 or 49 wins isn't going to mean a whole lot. What's going to mean a whole lot to me, our organization, and our fans is how we perform in the playoffs and how deep a run we can make, and that's what we're setting our sights on.
It's about what the players are doing. My job is facilitate that. My job is to put them in positions to succeed. My job is to listen to their ideas, take them if they're good, quietly push them to the side if they're not. My job is to help them grow.
I used to say, as an assistant, I would go in and close my door for three hours after practice and just watch film. Now it seems like I'm in a meeting and then another and then another for three hours that have nothing to do with basketball. It's just different.
I think a lot of personnel decisions come down to who's the best player today, like if we had to throw 'em in a game today versus what could their upside be 18 months from now. A lot of times, those are two different answers. That's the difficulty of player personnel.
I just want to keep getting better. People used to ask me - when I was winning in the D-League - why I wasn't in the NBA, and I'd tell them, 'I just want to learn and get better.' I figured it'd happen one day, and if it didn't, I really enjoyed my time coaching anyways.
I tried to convince those guys at the Bullets in the '95-'96 season that they could try to beat the mighty London Towers, who won everything the year before. I got out of bed every day with the mindset of getting the team to Wembley for the play-off final and to win the championship.
I think it's all machismo - 'Come on, you've got to guard your guy, man. If you can't guard your guy, then you can't play defence.' A lot of it is accountability, where you say, 'Hey, you're matched up with him. Go do your job.' The zone kind of sometimes moves a lot of pieces around.
People asked me, 'Why aren't you doing something more important?' When I was doing well in the D-League, they were like, 'Why can't you get an NBA job? Or a college job?' I don't think people thought much of what I was doing. That's fine. I was learning. Not just X's and O's, but team dynamics.
Sometimes I'm in that timeout, and I say, 'Let's go a possession of zone,' and they're like, 'Yeah, let's do it,' and that shows that they're confident enough to roll with whatever we're doing. And sometimes they're like, 'No, no, no, no.' They don't want a possession to get away from them, possibly.
The Energy job was probably the key. It kind of transitioned me back into the States. It gave me a link to the NBA. And I got to make some contacts and meet some players and get players set up and learn the NBA game and terminology and coaching those type of players. It was certainly a huge, huge key to getting to the NBA.