If I make it in the NBA or wind up playing overseas, I will be at peace.
Guarding LeBron James has to be the hardest job in basketball.
If someone were to ask me before I made the NBA, you going to have to go through all this, you're going to have to sign your soul away to play in the league, I still would have done it.
I knew I could hang on in the NBA, but I wasn't going to play.
I remember as a young player I had this dream of playing in the NBA.
It's so much harder to make the NBA than people think it is.
I'm blessed just making it to the NBA. That was my first goal and dream. Playing with Kobe and Shaq and for a coach like Phil Jackson, and then going to play with guys like Jordan and Jerry Stackhouse, it's just a crazy experience.
It was my dream for a long time to play in the NBA. When I was drafted, it was a challenge for me. I decided to go and see where I was compared to the best players in the world.
Going in, you want to play a perfect season and play throughout the whole entire season, but injuries are a part of basketball.
Every person that's in the NBA should experience playing in New York at least once in their career.
It's tough at first. You realize in the NBA, it's not easy. Each and every night, you're playing against that player that was the best high school player, that player that was the best player on his college team.
It's just hard to watch isolation basketball.
I mean, it's very difficult up there in the NBA.
When you're Kobe Bryant, you've got every little young guy coming at you every night, and it's you who's still got to carry the team. When he tore his Achilles... I just felt bad. I knew he was going to come back and be Kobe Bryant.
Yep, I jumped from college to the ABL, just in time for the league to go under.
It's the nature of basketball sometimes: every player and coach are going to have run-ins.
I'm the first player in history that doesn't want to play defense and still gets in foul trouble.
I'm going to be honest, playing in D-League games is tough.
I grew up playing basketball on the streets of New York City, and it was very, very rough, and I started playing in the NBA in the same way.
I'm probably not supposed to say this, but the truth is, there were so many times when I thought about quitting basketball, even when I was at Louisville. My freshman year, I shot 18 for 72 from three.
I thought, 'I'm going to play in Yugoslavia, then I'll go to play in Italy or Spain.' Then I'll be 28 or 29 and I'll try NBA. I never thought I can play in NBA because NBA was totally different world for us in Europe.
People don't understand how hard it is to get to the NBA and that's where I want to be.
Getting to the NBA really helped me personally on a lot of levels. I liked it so much that I wanted to stay there.
The basketball stuff has been the easiest part. The stuff that comes out of it, you lose a game and everyone talks about it on TV the next day. They may say some things that you may not agree with.
The game of basketball has been everything to me. My place of refuge, place I've always gone where I needed comfort and peace. It's been the site of intense pain and the most intense feelings of joy and satisfaction. It's a relationship that has evolved over time, given me the greatest respect and love for the game.
