A Quote by Mike Conley Jr.

Coming out as a rookie, no. 4 draft pick, you expected to see some playing time. — © Mike Conley Jr.
Coming out as a rookie, no. 4 draft pick, you expected to see some playing time.
I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.
Your life can change in one year. You can go from a nobody, not even getting any playing time on a college team, to being one of the most highly touted quarterbacks coming out of college for the draft.
Once you get into the NFL, it doesn't matter what draft pick you are, what round you are, if you're undrafted or not. It's football time again. The draft, all of that doesn't matter anymore.
If you're tanking to get a higher draft pick, you really shouldn't be playing hockey.
I think sometimes you just need to play in this league. As a rookie coming out of college, you don't understand the real significance of being a pro unless you're playing other pros. It doesn't help you to play sporadically here or there.
With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.
Veterans get priority in the training room and better parking, but there is not a whole lot of difference in terms of how they're treated in the competition for playing time. To me it doesn't matter if a guy is a 10-year veteran or a rookie. If the rookie is better, he finds his way onto the field.
I carried around a lot of weight and anxiety - expectations of being a top draft pick and fulfilling those. It was really burdensome and not fun. Stressful. I had to go through some things before I finally turned that around and got back to playing for the right reasons.
The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.
I think early in my development as a quarterback, before I ever got a Division I college offer or anything, my brother was in the spotlight, first-round draft pick. People expected me to be him, but I was underdeveloped, undersized, unrecruited... so it was tough at that point.
I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don't go out. I'm just locked away, writing. It's a time of meditation, of going into the story.
When I started out playing live, it was different. I felt good about it. Nobody knew who I was. I just opened for so-and-so. Now, I'm playing to people who are coming out to see the band. There's too much attention on the band and me.
I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.
I see myself as the No. 1 player in the draft, but it is what it is. You can just take it day-by-day, put in the work, and the draft is going to be the outcome of whatever the draft is.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
When I was a rookie, I had to shag balls out of the stands. It was my rookie duty.
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