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I think the most important thing about coaching is that you have to have a sense of confidence about what you're doing. You have to be a salesman and you have to get your players, particularly your leaders, to believe in what you're trying to accomplish on the basketball floor.
PHIL JACKSON, interview, Apr. 9, 1996
Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz. If someone drops a note, someone else must step into the vacuum and drive the beat that sustains the team.
PHIL JACKSON, The Last Season
Yes, victory is sweet, but it doesn't necessarily make life any easier the next season or even the next day.
PHIL JACKSON, Sacred Hoops
My philosophy is that you don't motivate players with speeches, you have motivated players that you draft. That's where they come in and those are the guys that are competitive. You can not teach competitiveness.
PHIL JACKSON, interview, Apr. 9, 1996
I never have had that yen, to be a behind-the-scenes guy, a manipulator of players and the builder of a franchise so to speak.
PHIL JACKSON, interview, Jun 4, 2004
An acrobatic dunk will make it onto SportsCenter. A simple, unspectacular bounce pass in the rhythm of the offense will not. System basketball has been replaced by players who want to be the system.
PHIL JACKSON, The Last Season
Basketball is a sport that involves the subtle interweaving of players at full speed to the point where they are thinking and moving as one.
PHIL JACKSON, Sacred Hoops
The best part of basketball, for those people on the inside, is the bus going to the airport after you've won a game on an opponent's floor. It's been a very tough battle. And preferably, in the playoffs. And that feeling that you have, together as a group, having gone to an opponent's floor and won a very good victory, is as about as high as you can get.
PHIL JACKSON, interview, Apr. 9, 1996
I thrive on challenges, and there is no more imposing challenge for someone in my profession than winning an NBA title.
PHIL JACKSON, The Last Season
I probably would have no capability of absorbing a 60-defeat season as a coach. It would be a foreign experience. My whole career, even as a player, has been on winning basketball clubs and it just seems to have been a part of the make-up of what’s been given me. That’s what I’ve been given and that’s what I’ve had to deal with. Some people can make fun of it or some people can have a good time with it, or some people can resent it. It’s just what it is.
PHIL JACKSON, interview, Jun. 4, 2004
The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.
PHIL JACKSON, attributed, Team Work: Rediscovering the Essence of Basketball
In basketball -- as in life -- true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way.
PHIL JACKSON, Sacred Hoops
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