Basketball quotes
3.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside basketball — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Horrible, terrible AAU basketball. It's stupid. It doesn't teach our kids how to play the game at all so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don't know how to post. They don't know the fundamentals of the game. It's stupid."
"I don't want to be the next Michael Jordan, I only want to be Kobe Bryant."
"I am more than just a serious basketball fan. I am a life-long addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky and I learned, early on, that Habitual Domination was a natural way of life."
"My whole career has been trying to please people in basketball. Now it's time to please myself."
"I always want my players to show class, knock'em down, pat on the back, and run back to the huddle."
"If you want to coach you have three rules to follow to win. One, surround yourself with people who can't live without football. I've had a lot of them. Two, be able to recognize winners. They come in all forms. And, three, have a plan for everything. A plan for practice, a plan for the game. A plan for being ahead, and a plan for being behind 20-0 at half, with your quarterback hurt and the phones dead, with it raining cats and dogs and no rain gear because the equipment man left it at home."
"The idea of molding men means a lot to me."
"You have to learn what makes this or that Sammy run. For one it's a pat on the back, for another it's eating him out, for still another it's a fatherly talk, or something else. You're a fool if you think as I did as a young coach, that you can treat them all alike."
"There is no sin in not liking to play; it's a mistake for a boy to be there if he doesn't want to."
"Basketball, more than any other sport, is a team game...about the thousands of small, unselfish acts, the sacrifices on the part of the players that result in team building."
"Praise behaviour that you want repeated"
"Negative thoughts are contagious and they get passed around like a disease. I inoculate myself against the fear of failure."
"The most important thing to me is the friends that I've made."
"I was the bridge between the Michael Jordan era and LeBron James era."
"Personally I just want to win a championship."
"I tell the young kids, you have eight or nine months of the year to play basketball and the rest of the year you can relax. So, you've got to be ready. It doesn't last forever."
"Realize that the hardest step in achieving anything is making a true commitment."
"[My] career was sputtering until [I] did a 360 and got headed in the right direction."
"Empower the people around you, from the janitor to the athletic director. You do that by being sincere, caring about others, and then putting it into practice."
"Everybody thinks the grass is greener on the other side. If you talk to most artists, they think they can play something, you know, "If I had stayed playing football in high school, if I had been doing basketball..." Everybody's got their fantasies and thinks the grass is greener. It's not. It's not."
