Phil Jackson Guys Quotations

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.

This is a team we told our guys not to foul, and we end up sending them to the line 35 times. That was one of the things we didn't expect.

He's having the best season of anybody in the NBA. There are a couple guys who are having really good years, but there's not anybody who's having the kind of year he's having.

We'd rather have Steve being the guy that's taking the shots and making the points than having a bunch of guys get 20 points or 15 points a game.

I think he gave the ball up in various points of the year, and I think there's been a fine balance between guys stepping up and making shots and Kobe trusting his teammates. It hasn't got to the point where it's not happening, where I'm disappointed, but there's opportunities that still could be there that have to be exploited even more and we have to recognize that as a team.

When you have guys like Dixon and Blake basically have career nights, that really sets you on the edge as a team. We didn't come out with the intent to play defense tonight.

His confidence grew as we kept going back in to him, and he got more productive from that. I think guys started relying on the fact that he could be counted on to catch the basketball and convert.

I wonder if they ever are. I thought they might let that go this year, but it didn't seem apparent at all. Right away, he got booed. He just may be one of those guys that has to carry that for a year or two until another group comes along that gives him a break.

I've seen quite a few guys do that in his situation, focused. He wanted to stay in, in the second quarter. He asked to stay in so he could get loose, get a second wind.

Kareem met these guys at the door and he said, 'That effort wins on Wednesday (in Game 2).' He was very supportive. I think they heard that -- that if they give that kind of effort again, they can win.

I think they felt intimidated at some point in this playoff. ...Our big guys have been effective. ... They just wanted to make a stand and make a statement.

Von has a lot of game. He is an aggressive player, but sometimes it is good to have a wild horse out there who can push guys and challenge people.

It's a tall order, without a doubt. But that's the key to this series is how you're going to slow down the guy that makes this offense generate points and close out on the guys that are getting wide-open shots.

I told the guys that the team is going to double- and triple-team Kobe at the end. So he's not going to get the ball. Somebody else is going to have to step and make shots.

I told the guys at halftime, they had their nap in the first half, now it's time to play. And you saw what happened. We slept almost all the way through the third quarter.

I think some of our guys hit a little bit of a wall here. We talked a lot about that ... This is a heavy time to play basketball. You've really got to take care of yourself. I had a couple of guys fighting through things out there, under-the-weather type of things. They just couldn't get themselves going.

I thought it was vindictive. I don't like to see it because he's one of the guys that we nurtured here. He was contributing to us a lot in the championship (run) two years ago.

It was the way the game played out. We had guys open, there were situations that were going right.