My goal early in becoming a head coach so young was to find out if I could do it. I just wanted to see if I could be a good head coach and then start learning from head coaching.

My job is to coach the team and get them to try to play the best they can come April, May, and June.

The gym in Milton Keynes or wooden backboards at Chester - maybe it didn't feel that glamorous at the time, but it was fun.

I think we're always chasing a win once the ball goes up.

They do not eat Yorkshire pudding on Sunday in Iowa.

I said it when I got hired. I said, for five years, I had a 1,000 people telling me I was going to be a head coach in the NBA. And when I got the job, those same 1,000 people were shocked.

It's pretty draining, the amount of games I watch on a daily basis. It's pretty much non-stop.

Phil Handy played for me in England and has obviously risen to stardom in his area of what he does.

I think it's really important that we get an experienced staff. Guys that have been a head coach, to me, at some level is important to me. I value head coaching just because it's good to know what it's like to be the decision maker.

In a game, I'm locked in. I maybe notice three rows in the stands the arena over, and that's it.

It used to be every single time you got the rebound, you handed it to the point guard, or you outlet it to the point guard, or everyone cleared, and you waited until the point guard brought the ball up the floor.

I'm gonna back my players.

Sometimes I'm in that timeout, and I say, 'Let's go a possession of zone,' and they're like, 'Yeah, let's do it,' and that shows that they're confident enough to roll with whatever we're doing. And sometimes they're like, 'No, no, no, no.' They don't want a possession to get away from them, possibly.

I think there's some certain attitudes and certain guys that can feed some positive energy, and that keeps you going through an 82-game schedule.

It's such a long season, right? It's certainly serious business, but it's no sense that we all have to be miserable doing it.

I think a lot of personnel decisions come down to who's the best player today, like if we had to throw 'em in a game today versus what could their upside be 18 months from now. A lot of times, those are two different answers. That's the difficulty of player personnel.

I'm getting older and mellower in my old age.

I think it's all machismo - 'Come on, you've got to guard your guy, man. If you can't guard your guy, then you can't play defence.' A lot of it is accountability, where you say, 'Hey, you're matched up with him. Go do your job.' The zone kind of sometimes moves a lot of pieces around.

Obviously, things evolve; teams see you play a little bit and start try to do things, and the one thing that'll happen is if one team has success in something, you can bet the next three teams are doing some similar things, too.

The game's evolving quickly, man, and somebody's gotta be trying some new stuff.

At some point in your life, you try to self-reflect and ask yourself, 'Why do I want to win so bad?'

Don't let people take you ahead of where you are at.

We want to always play with pace on offence.

Fifty-nine or 54 or 52 or 49 wins isn't going to mean a whole lot. What's going to mean a whole lot to me, our organization, and our fans is how we perform in the playoffs and how deep a run we can make, and that's what we're setting our sights on.

I've always been like that: after a loss, I go home and pass out and don't give it another thought. When I'm winning, I'm too excited.

I place a lot of value on pace of the game, going after people... always be the aggressor and forcing the issue a little bit when we have the ball, and when we don't have it, we want to come at you, too.

For every philosophical idea about how we're going to do things, there has to be a plan to get there, and we have to be able to execute it, first in practice and then in games.

I think if you're going to be a little bit innovative or risk-taking, sometimes you're going to be wrong, and it's going to look bad. I understand that.

That's your worry as a head coach: Are you going to go in there, give them everything you've got, and are they going to respond?

Your big has to be able to make 'em pay from the perimeter.

I've had a lot of really good preparation. I've coached a lot of games around the world.

I worked at chemistry and developing a style of play on both sides of the ball and studied success and winning.

I've got way more attention than I ever needed or wanted.

It's not like I'm shy or anything. I'm not.

The Energy job was probably the key. It kind of transitioned me back into the States. It gave me a link to the NBA. And I got to make some contacts and meet some players and get players set up and learn the NBA game and terminology and coaching those type of players. It was certainly a huge, huge key to getting to the NBA.

When I started coaching, I wanted to find out quickly if I could do it.

I started at Grand View and all the England stuff. I just wanted to learn and get better, and that's kind of what the experiences were.

I didn't think reaching the NBA was a possibility when I coached Derby in 1990. I was right out of college when I went there and was more concerned about playing a bit and getting that out of my system.

I know the 'big spending club v. smaller club' theme is popular in the Premier League. I don't think about it - we are 30 teams trying to win the championship, and you do what you need to do.

I would want to start. I want to run out there in front of 20,000 people and get my name announced. I get it. I get that.

Try to put our guys in different positions, try some different combinations, et cetera, to prepare us for the playoffs, which is what matters.

Hindsight is, of course, 20/20. Any time you go back, and you look at something, and now you've got the result of something, you say, 'Yeah, maybe it wasn't the right idea.'

You've got to coach with what you have and who's available.

I read a couple books on democratic coaching.

I love jazz and blues, where there's a structure, but a lot of the cool stuff is veering off the page and playing.

One of the things I like to do is let the players play and the coaches coach.

I think I'm always a little bit under construction. I'm a project that I'm trying to improve upon.

I like to play aggressive, in general.

I still say, to this day, I could not guard Nigel Lloyd.

When I came back to England after my stint with Derby in 1995, I really wanted more time to study coaching.