Nick Saban Quotes

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.

We feel fortunate [with Canada hockey team]. We have got a lot of guys who love to play, but they also love to win even more. We are pretty happy. Although we are young, we like our group of players.

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.

Visualize a wagon wheel as a complete team. A leader might be the hub of the wheel at the center. Now suppose the spokes are the connecting relationships the leader is building with people on the outer rim of the wheel. If the hub is removed, then the entire wheel collapses. In a situation like that, if a team loses the leader, the entire team collapses.

One of the greatest joys of leadership is assembling and knitting together teams of fantastic people.

I think that it is very interesting to write about a team because a team is a group of people who work in very close quarters and have very intense relationships so - in my days of playing sports, I was very rarely on a team that did not have it's own peculiar dynamic, and you wind up having very intense feelings for good and for bad about these people with whom you spend many hours a day.

I think it's an extremely important factor to have your team together. It goes back to having distractions. When you all stay together for a period of time you're not training people or feeling out different personalities.

It's more difficult to achieve something with the national team because players from several clubs get together and less frequently.

Felix Magath works with pressure. At first, we didn't know where we stood with him. That prompted the players to give their best because they wanted to play, but after a while the players knew where they stood and Magath no longer received the same effect.

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

That's something that's so often overlooked in this game - the dynamics of the locker room.

Everyone wants to be close to your team. You don't want to have guys that don't feel comfortable in the locker room.

Because when you work with a different team, the expectations are different and then you deliver in a very different way. You look back at it and you're proud of yourself. And when the same people come in and you do the same thing, it's boring. You could re-envision it again and again but when the new chemistry of ideas comes in, something happens as a team.

There are 3 things I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?

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.

It's much easier when your team's winning. When your team starts to lose, that's where a lot of these quarterback controversies divide a locker room. The key, as a pro, is to be a pro.

As the workplace becomes more specialized, from offices to medical centers to factories, teams of people must accomplish their work by collaborating with each other. In my work in filmmaking, we need talented individuals with technical skills, but their abilities to communicate and work with others are just as valuable.

Absolutely, you rise and fall based on your creative team. I have continuity across different films that I've done. I was even fortunate enough to reach back and include people that had worked on Horton with me, as well.

I don't really want to go into my problems with the team at the time except to say that no one's ever had to pay me to play basketball.

Only hire people you want to have dinner with.

Don't say I don't get along with my teammates. I just don't get along with some of the guys on the team.

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.

You must learn how to hold a team together. You must lift some men up, calm others down, until finally they've got one heartbeat. Then you've got yourself a team.

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.

I think the teams biggest struggle is remaining a team. It's kinda like a puzzle, If one piece of the puzzle is missing then the puzzle can't be completed. Every team member plays an important part.