A slumpbuster is when you have to take one for the team. It's finding the biggest, nastiest, fattest broad, and you put the wood to her to come out of your slump. Also known as 'jumping on a grenade for the team'.
When you turn your team upside down and try to figure out what the culture of the team is, you take the greatest risk a team can take.
We can find athletes. The biggest challenge is personality. It's finding charisma. In most sports, they tell you to turn down the personality. Look like everyone else on the team. It's the team; it's not you. In this, it's the opposite. It's you, not the team. We want you to become the big star.
To train a national team, you have to know what team you have at your disposal and what this team is capable of. You need to get the best out of them and take them as far as possible. Yet, sometimes, you can't achieve your goals.
I'm afraid that if they bring the Sonics back, what kind of team are they going to put on the court? Are they going to put the effort out? If they bring the team back, are they going to really put a good team out there? Or do we just want any team?
I think you can learn lots of skills playing football. Team building is one. You also learn how to solve problems within your team. Sometimes you find yourself playing with players that you don't necessarily like, but you have to put your differences aside for the good of the team. It gives you skills that you may not appreciate at the time.
That's probably the biggest thing for any team in the playoffs, for every team - if you want to win. It's not about your numbers. It's not about scoring. It's about the team and whatever it is you need to do to help the team win. Whether it's rebounding, taking charges, getting steals, blocking shots or guarding somebody.
You have to think for your team-mates and give them positive response. Whatever happens as a captain you have to take the responsibility. Backing my team-mates and supporting them was the biggest learning.
No man is more important than The Team. No coach is more important than The Team. The Team, The Team, The Team, and if we think that way, all of us, everything that you do, you take into consideration what effect does it have on my Team?
You need experience around you when you are a young player. You need to know how to run a team, to lead a team and to play as a team which means, your team has leaders but you still function as a team.
The owners need to have some protection against players jumping from team to team. The fans have the right to expect some continuity on the team they support from year to year.
If your heart is bigger than the biggest guy on the team, then you're the biggest guy on the team.
When you are not playing, you need to train harder. You need to keep faith. And when you come into the team, you have to do exactly what your team-mates are doing to help the team achieve something.
In high school, I was the best broad jumper on our team, and I kind of thought that when I got to MIT, I'd probably still be the best broad jumper, 'cause why do broad jumpers come to MIT? But it turned out to actually be the other way around. There was another person in my class who could jump about 3 feet further than I could.
If I may make a football analogy, we're a team whether we're a football team or community or the United States of America. We are part of a team and I believe the people on that team have a right, but they also have the obligation if there is something that is not good or we don't agree on, to speak about it.
When a coach trusts you enough to take you from the youth team and put you into the first team, one of the best teams in the world, it's not easy.
My normal is craziness - moving around and jumping from team to team and having to get used to different guys in a short period of time.