Brad Stevens Quotes

I think teams win. I don't think offense wins. I don't think defense wins. I don't think special teams - teams win.

I had Lana and she was the number one player on my team

Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don’t have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won’t pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive.

A player who makes a team great is more valuable than a great player. Losing yourself in the group, for the good of the group - that's teamwork.

A player who makes a team great is better than a great player.

I'm looking for players who make their teammates better. You do that with enthusiasm and passion.

The greatest players fit with the team. They play within the team's style, rather than asking the team to change its style.

Gettin' good players is easy. Gettin' 'em to play together is the hard part.

The sign of a great player is how much he elevates his colleagues' performance.

To have a successful team, you have to have great players of course - but you have to have good personalities and good people as well.

Your best players have to unite and inspire the group... otherwise, they'll divide the group

The way a team plays as a whole determines its success.

It's all right buying all these good players but they've got to gel, and that takes time.

A winning player is nothing more than a player on a winning team. A losing player is a guy who played on a losing team that year.

Football is a collective sport and many times it doesn't depend on you playing well. It depends if the team is playing well.

Whether it's the best player or the 12th man next to the Gatorade cooler, understanding the personalities on your team is key.

It's not always the best roster that wins, it's the best team, and sometimes that maybe doesn't jell all that well.

You don't have to be best friends as basketball players but I do believe in chemistry. I think it makes everything different if a team is really together and they're all on that same page. They might not like each other, per se, but if you're on the same page and the chemistry is there, you can play great basketball. You can go back to teams like Detroit, the Bad Boys. Those guys had great chemistry, that's why they won.

It's easy to get good players. Getting them to play together, that's the hard part.

I think the only thing that matters is you win as a team and you lose as a team. And so the team needs to understand that no one player is bigger than any other player. Everybody has a role... Every single role is important.

When your great players are team players, everybody else follows their lead. The best team doesn't always win - it's usually the team that gets along best.

Players have to buy into your system and be willing to accept the role, you, as the coach, have assigned to them

The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.

To have harmony on a team, you need a coach who can get inside the head of every player and get them all pulling in one direction.