Mike Krzyzewski Quotes

A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That's how I want you to play.

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With me and basketball, it became part of me.

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My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.

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In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure.

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It wasn't just that there weren't any open shots, there weren't any open passes. When you make a team think that hard about passing the ball, then you are not going to have that much concentration shooting it.

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I had a really bad temper, when I was growing up. Sport helped me channel that temper into more positive acts.

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When I went to high school, an all-boys' school, a Catholic school, I tried out for football, and I didn't make it. It was the first time, athletically, that I was knocked down.

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So let's talk about Duke basketball.

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I've told him that if you miss and we lose, then we'll walk off arm and arm. Your players win games. As a coach, I try to let my best players be the ones that decide games.

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I don't know who we are, what our identity is. We're still developing. That's why these games are so important for us. It's not like you can let up because these guys still need to develop.

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I would hope they're an NCAA (Tournament) team. I thought they were before this game, but certainly, they're very deserving of it.

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That's what I do now I lead and I teach. If we win basketball games from doing that, then that's great, but I lead and teach. Those are the two things I concentrate on.

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Basketball was not my main sport in grade school, or even the first year of high school.

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You should crave this opportunity, to be in that moment. It's exciting. The beauty of the tournament is you have one pitch. You hit it or you miss it. If you hit it, you get another pitch.

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We feel like we won a really tough basketball game against an outstanding team.

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This team has had its share of unbelievable problems. You would think that some of the nerves are skin-level, and some of those things can just happen. ... We have great empathy for them.

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I wasn't a great player in college, but I was a very good high school player. It really shaped a lot of what I do as a basketball coach now.

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If you just focus on J.J., just watch him, you'd be shocked at the maze of things that he usually has to go through to get a shot. When you are doing that, there are times when you can get distracted or get down or get emotional about it, which would take away from your next play. So, one of the key words for J.J. is maturity.

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We approach Wake as a very good basketball team. There have been more close games in the league this season than I've ever seen, and Wake is one of those teams where four or five games could have easily gone the other way.

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To break any record like that, you have to have endurance. You have to play well in a lot of games. He has talent, exceptional talent, but he has great endurance and a great commitment to play. He's really taken good care of himself.

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I thought the game was played at their tempo, and that's to their credit. They got us to play at their tempo. And then the last four minutes of the first half, we finally got hands on balls and turned defense into offense.

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That puts this group in elite company. And this was truly a team win.

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This injury is a bone bruise. It really has nothing to do with the other injury except that it's in the same foot -- that's the commonality there. You want him to come in as close as possible to 100 percent, and that's what we're trying to do.

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I've tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we'll win again, but I've also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport.

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I'm still not a great reader, but my wife is and my daughters are, and I envy them. I think I got into a bad habit of trying to do something all the time, instead of trying to sit down and take my time a little bit.

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