Al Horford Quotes

The 3-point line has changed the game so much. The day of the big man, unless you're extraordinary good, is not numbered, but certainly you gotta be a lot more versatile to play the game today. You gotta be able to really run up and down the court.

The first year I kind of struggled to find where my shots was coming from, when to cut, where to be.

Street basketball is all about shakes and fakes, crossing your defender up. The NBA is more strategic.

I think in Toronto my job was to score just based on the system that we had. We played a lot of iso basketball - a lot of one-on-one basketball.

I'm just going to continue to make good plays. Making the right decisions, good decisions with the ball so my team can play with a great flow.

If you give him a 3-point shot, you might as well count it. I'd rather have Steph Curry beat me 14 points and 14 assists than let him get 40. Because his 40 is just so loud. And it's because of those 3s.

When you're watching from the bench, you can pick up on everything - where guys like to shoot the ball from, how teams defend the pick-and-roll, which big men are good at hedging the screen and so on.

Who says a center can't make the pass into the post? Michael Jordan, effectively, was a post player and you saw with the championship teams players able to do multiple things.

I don't think I was a good enough coach to help an NBA team win a game when I first got to that league.

I want to make sure the other point guard can't start his offense until 12 or 13 seconds. Then I've put my team in position to defend just one pick-and-roll and one pass.

The things I've worked on in the offseason have mostly been on my footwork and pick-and-roll - using my size and not just always trying to face up and go by a guy.

If a guy is shooting a shot in the corner 70 percent of the missed shots usually come off that other side and 30 percent hits off the front rim so just playing the percentages and kind of studying your teammates' shots throughout the course of the game.

The bruisers and the bump-and-grind guys, use your athleticism on the floor, try to wear them out - run them through a lot of pick-and-rolls, run the floor, do a lot more athletic stuff just to try to wear them down.

I had watched Magic my whole career, even before my career, and so I knew the style of player that he was, and I knew what I had to do to prohibit him from being as effective on the basketball court as he had been throughout his career.

Kobe Bryant should know how to defend a pick and roll.

Inferior guards play on the sidelines and great guards play in the middle. Isiah, Magic, Chris Paul, all get to the middle

I learned so much from Sue about the Xs and Os of the game of basketball.

I don't have a lot of experience running basketball teams.I'm just trying to get smart enough even to understand everything going on. As much of a fan as I am, I haven't played the game since ninth-grade. If you told me when I bought the team that there were 12 kinds of pick and rolls, I would've told you I have no frickin' clue about that.

There is not some secret formula, it comes down to completing passes, being efficient on first and second down and making plays when the ball is in your hands.

For me, it's just finding ways to create shots. I feel like if I got a shot off, it has a good chance of going in. So it's finding ways of creating different shots. Being smart. I watch film a lot, and different tricks that I can do to get my shot off the ball and creating ways to get shots off of pick-and-rolls or one-on-one situations like that.

It used to be you a needed a true center to win championships, but now the point guard position holds just as much weight.

You just constantly are evaluating and learning and drawing players and coverages and talking through it. It's part of making you the player, how you want to approach the game.

My whole life I played the point, so naturally I think as a point. Two guard, I get to score more... During the game, I like to mix it up.

All the in-depth scouting reports we have on the opposing pitchers - just kind of learning how to study that, it's huge.

I think the best thing about my game that translates into the NBA is being able to create for others. Using open space and using pick and rolls.