C. J. McCollum Quotes

I don't have a lot of experience running basketball teams.I'm just trying to get smart enough even to understand everything going on. As much of a fan as I am, I haven't played the game since ninth-grade. If you told me when I bought the team that there were 12 kinds of pick and rolls, I would've told you I have no frickin' clue about that.

I had a vision of how basketball should be played. And the vision was the Knicks teams that won the championship in 1970 and 1973. I wanted a team that emphasized defense. I wanted a team that on offense had a system where players moved off the ball, and the ball moved.

Just hearing somebody's voice in center field, it helps our guards out to know where they need to go, when the screen is coming, when the back door is coming, when the flare is coming. When different things like that happen and we're talking, it helps us all out in the long run.

In Indiana, I knew the offense in and out. I knew spacing; I knew personnel. I knew the offense, how coach wanted to play me. So when I just wanted to take over and control the game, I could.

The first year I kind of struggled to find where my shots was coming from, when to cut, where to be.

I think in Toronto my job was to score just based on the system that we had. We played a lot of iso basketball - a lot of one-on-one basketball.

It's easy to draw up isolation basketball - it's not easy to draw up great motion offense with passing and cutting.

A lot of good pick-and-roll players keep the defenders on their back so they can see the whole floor.

If a guy is shooting a shot in the corner 70 percent of the missed shots usually come off that other side and 30 percent hits off the front rim so just playing the percentages and kind of studying your teammates' shots throughout the course of the game.

I can't tell you the difference between the triangle offense and the Princeton offense.

I learned so much from Sue about the Xs and Os of the game of basketball.

When you're older and get more experience, the game slows down for you. I know exactly what spot to get to where I can always get my shot off no matter who's guarding me.

Charles Barkley taught me a lot when I played against him. How he would use his body or use his dribble to get people in there and all that stuff.

I had been a basketball fan growing up, and I felt that if we brought in the proper coach, and we played basketball the old fashioned way - where defense is paramount and offense involved movement off the ball and movement of the ball - we could build a winning team, and Chicago would respond to that.

Corner is the easiest three in basketball.

It's tough to get wings deep post catches when you're playing with two bigs all the time.

Street basketball is all about shakes and fakes, crossing your defender up. The NBA is more strategic.

I've talked to a lot of NBA superstars and legends about how I can improve my IQ offensively and defensively.

Knicks fans are the smartest in the world and they know you can't just play one end of the court.

I got used to throwing a lot of lobs, got used to finding shooters, finding cutters. Each year at Duke I have had to score in different spots. I think that has helped me so much.

If you've got a big man who scores the ball, you've got to defend, and if you've got a shooter, you've got to pick and choose who you're going to defend.

The intensity and importance of each possession. That's the thing about the NBA that doesn't always translate to television.

Most teams won't really focus on one player because they've got multiple players to defend and that will open up a lot of things for me.

This should be a written rule: Guards should always defer to centers. I don't care how good you are, those big guys make the game so much easier for every other person on that team, and without them, everyone else needs to work twice as hard.

I'm always open. As soon as I cross the half-court line, I'm open.