“There are plenty of teams in every sport that have great players and never win titles.”

If you do the work you get rewarded. There are no shortcuts in life.

I never thought a role model should be negative.

A coach is someone that sees beyond your limits and guides you to greatness!

The key to success is failure.

If you are confident you have done everything possible to prepare yourself, then there is nothing to fear.

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.

Excellence isn’t a one-week or one-year ideal. It’s a constant.

The best come from the worst.

I’m all about challenges and seeing if I can go out and see if I can achieve something. If at the end of the day I do it, great. If I don’t, I can live with myself.

To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don’t isolate.

The reason I became such a successful athlete was my mind was saying that no matter who you put up against me, I am better, I am the best.

I play to win, whether during practice or a real game.

Earn your leadership every day.

All I wanted to do was to improve, to keep getting better.

The best evaluation I can make of a player is to look in his eyes and see how scared they are.

A leader can’t make excuses. There has to be quality in everything you do. Off the court, on the court, in the classroom.

Accept a loss as a learning experience, and never point fingers at your teammates.

If you’re trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I’ve had them; everybody has had them.

The people who truly know me know what I’m like. There have been people who try to say things that aren’t fair, and I check them. And then they don’t like me because I checked them.

As far as carrying the torch for the years to come, I don’t know. I just want to be the best basketball player I can be.

I don’t have to hear that criticism, that idotic criticism anymore.

People ask me if I could fly, I said, yeah – for a little while.

I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.

I knew where I wanted to go, what kind of player I wanted to become and I focused on getting there.