The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.

A coach's main job is to reawaken a spirit in which the players can blend together effortlessly.

Yes, victory is sweet, but it doesn't necessarily make life any easier the next season or even the next day.

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.

My job as a coach was to make something meaningful out of one of the most mundane activities on the planet: playing pro basketball.

An acrobatic dunk will make it onto Sports Center. 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 System basketball has been replaced by players who want to be the system.

There's a term, agape, you hear used a lot with charismatic religious groups, that it's this more pure love of caring, of sharing of concern and understanding. I think players and teams have to come to that at some point in the season to become successful. Maybe not "personal friends," but they become teammates at the highest level of that term.