Every year in every major competition we always focus on the offensive players and make them the favorites. When they don’t win, we say it’s an upset, but before the game everyone concludes that the best defensive team will win the series. You can change the whole atmosphere of a situation by certain defensive moves, far more than you can change the atmosphere by offensive moves.

A good pass is just as difficult as a good shot. There are two kinds of passes, one pass to get rid of the ball and one pass to make a play. The attitude of passing is to make good passes because if you make good passes, then shots become easier. If you make good passes you distract the defense. The coach should theoretically know his team and know how to help it accomplish what it wants to. In practice, the coach should watch the players passing the ball to certain spots and if they can’t do that, then figure out why they can’t. Likewise, if the target that they are passing to is not in the proper place, then why isn’t he?

My theory was always never to concentrate on what you did wrong, concentrate on what you do right. That is how you want to play, but teams have ebbs and flows. When things weren’t going right, we’d always call time out and figure out that we weren’t playing the way we wanted to play, but the way they wanted to play. Well, that’s when you have to decide, when you’re playing good, what do you usually do? You emphasize going out there and doing what you do when you’re playing your best. What I did was I individually went over what plays to use to our advantage. Sometimes we would play a whole quarter running the same play. What made me do that? Well if they can’t stop it, why would we do the other guys job and stop doing it?