535 Quotes by Pat Riley

He's grabbing the ball strongly. He's catching the ball in traffic now. It's positioning. It's conditioning. It's getting your head under the rim.

Every time we see this team, and we'll see it again this week, the zone, while it doesn't bother us, it gets us out of sync. We did not play with much energy in the first four of five minutes of the game and then once we started to play with energy and got down the floor quicker things began to open up for us.

That was a positive note. You could tell he was comfortable.

Once he gets into the open court, forget it.

We measure areas of performance that are often ignored: jumping in pursuit of every rebound even if you don't get it, swatting at every pass, diving for loose balls, letting someone smash into you in order to draw the foul. These 'effort' statistics are also stored on computer. Effort is what ultimately separates journeyman players from impact players. Knowing how well a player executes all these little things is the key to unlocking career-best performances.

He was definitely set back with the back for three months, and I don't think he ever really regained physically his game 100 percent.

That's two games in a row that we showed, at a time when we need to show it, a real lockdown mentality defensively. It's not surprising to me if they're committed on doing it. They've done it off and on. Not consistent. It's when the mood strikes them.

There's a fine line here, and that fine line is that we are operating in a corporate world and pro basketball is part of that world,

Shoulda, coulda, and woulda won't get it done. In attacking adversity, only a positive attitude, alertness, and regrouping to basics can launch a comeback.