Bill O'Brien Quotes

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.

Coaching is salesmanship. Coaching is winning players over and convincing them they have to play together. It takes a team conviction to play together to make things work.

We believe in people executing their role and caring about the team more than anything individually

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

Selfishness is the greatest challenge for a coach. Most players are more concerned with making themselves better than the team.

During the season, your team should be led with exuberance and excitement. You should live the journey. You should live it right. You should live it together. You should live it shared. You should try to make one another better. You should get on one another if somebody's not doing their part. You should hug one another when they are. You should be disappointed in a loss and exhilarated in a win. It's all about the journey.

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.

In basketball, you can be the greatest individual player in the world and still lose every game, because a team will always beat an individual.

No coach is more important than the Team

The Spurs really are a family. They have a bunch of good guys that want to win, and the way they play is so unselfish. I’m looking forward to being involved in it. I feel that teams with players who are very close end up winning.

We cannot take responsibility for every goal we concede, we all need to do our part across the field to ensure we win as a team.

When the team is doing well, individual performances don't count.

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.

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

Team members have to be focused on the collective good of the team. Too often, they focus their attention on their department, their budget, their career aspirations, their egos.

I don't consider myself as the best player in the world. I'm not obsessed with individual titles. I'm much more interested in being part of a team which wins trophies.

We're focusing on what we need to do. The only attention we're thinking about is giving each other the attention that we need as a team, and making sure that everyone in here knows how they important they are to our success.

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.

How good can we expect to be if our best player is not our best teammate

There are five fundamental qualities that make every team great: communication, trust, collective responsibility, caring and pride. I like to think of each as a separate finger on the fist. Any one individually is important. But all of them together are unbeatable

A team doesn't win the championship if its players are working from different agendas.

This team just wasn't good enough today, but they had the unity I always wanted. To have an American team like this has always been a dream of mine.

In order to have a winner, the team must have a feeling of unity; every player must put the team first ahead of personal glory.

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

It's the most pleasurable experience in the world! When you're on a great team and you get hot, your teammates milk you dry - they wear you out and there's nothing like being on a great team.