"It’s not about physical skills. It goes far beyond that. When I first came here, McCloskey [the GM] took a lot of heat for drafting a small guy. But he knew the only way our team would rise to the top would be by mental skills, not size or talent… every player wants more minutes…more shots. And it kills them. Our team has been up at the Championship level four years now. We could have easily self-destructed.
It’s hard not to be selfish. The art of winning is complicated by statistics, which for us becomes money. Well, you gotta fight that, find a way around it. And I think we have. If we win this, we’ll be the first team in history to win it without a single player averaging 20 points. First team. Ever. We got 12 guys who are totally committed to winning. Every night we found a different person to win it for us.
Look at our team statistically. We’re one of the worst teams in the league. So now you have to find a new formula to judge basketball. There were a lot of times I had my doubts about this approach, because all you kept telling me it could never be done this way. Statistically, it made me look horrible. But I kept looking at the won-loss record and how we kept improving and I kept saying to myself, ‘Isiah, you’re doin’ the right thing, so be stubborn, and one day people will find a different way to judge a player. They won’t just pick up the newspaper and say, oh, this guy was 9 for 12 with 8 rebounds so he was the best player in the game.’ Lots of times, on our team, you can’t tell who the best player in the game was. ‘Cause everybody did something good. That’s what makes us so good. The other team has to worry about stopping eight or nine people instead of two or three. It’s the only way to win. The only way to win. That’s the way the game was invented. But there’s more to that. You also got to create an environment that won’t accept losing.”
- Isiah Thomas
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