Danny Ainge Quotes

It doesn't change the way we play, I'll tell you that much. If we hit a guy and get fined, we get fined.

The hand check has always been a part of pro basketball.

The game of basketball is not played with throwing punches, throwing elbows.

In this day and age, in modern goalkeeping, if you come out and you catch the ball and you get smacked, you're going to get the foul.

Freedom of movement, which is a great rule, doesn't mean freedom to go to the rim for a layup or freedom to take any shot you want to take or me going in there and not playing through contact.

There needs to be a flat rule where if someone's playing a shot you sit in the chair, and probably more referees need to be a bit sterner with how they apply that rule.

Football is a contact sport and sometimes is difficult to measure that.

When you go out on a football field, you are responsible for taking care of yourself. The more rules you get, the less players truly take care of themselves.

It's been made clear to all of us that a player should never leave the playing field and go into the stands.

When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately - unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.

We penalize and suspend players for making contact with the head while checking, in an effort to reduce head injuries, yet we still allow fighting. We're stuck in the middle and need to decide what kind of sport do we want to be. Either anything goes and we accept the consequences, or take the next step and eliminate fighting.

I just think more precaution should be taken when I'm inside the pocket. Look at all the replays - I'm on the ground every time. It's unfortunate for myself, it's unfortunate for my team and I'd be lying if I sat here and said I wasn't frustrated right now.

I've heard all the coaches complaining about the new CBA rules limiting padded practice. I don't like the reduction to just 15 padded practices during the season. When I coached, we always practiced in pads; and three days a week.

Athletes at all ages are bigger and stronger than ever before. And they are being encouraged - sometimes even incentivized, as we recently learned was the case on at least one National Football League team - to play to injure.

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

NFL fans have less sympathy for fallen players than the Romans had for blind Christians.

The NFL, and I've played a lot of years for them, and they have a lot of restrictions on their players, they have restrictions on their licensees, they have restrictions on everything.

Back in the '80s and '90s, you could hit the quarterback low, you could hit the quarterback high. You could hit him pretty much late.

The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all. Everyone is under too much scrutiny now to take a chance on candidates who suddenly blow up into a comic meme, a punchline, a ribald hashtag.

We need to let the referee's sole thing be to protect the quarterback and get those late hits out of there. They even have a stat on television that says 'knockdowns.' Knockdowns means that you knock him down after he throws the ball. The assumption is, if it's legal, we'll make excuses for them.

Quarterbacks are untouchable nowadays. If you hit a quarterback too hard, or if you fall on him with too much weight - which is a judgment thing from a professional standpoint - you're going to get flagged.

There are a couple people who have complained on other teams about some of the things that Pittsburgh players have done. Some of that goes in the category of gamesmanship. Some of that goes to the fact that we need to be vigilant as a league to make sure that players aren't unnecessarily and inappropriately hurt.

We have recently moved into an era when... everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information just by stroking a few keys on a terminal.

It's not an exercise on how to avoid getting hit. I think there are certain safety measures that take care of the mental part of it, with players not looking to hit somebody in the head. They've done that. But let's not take the entertainment value out of football.

On any play where there's a scramble of 22 men, blindside hits and unprotected hits on knees occur.