Tom Heinsohn Quotes

You gotta learn that if you're gonna take the last shot of the game, it's either gonna go in, or it's not gonna go in, and you're either gonna be the hero or the goat.

As the wonderful agony begins for 1964-65, I sometimes wonder why I do it. I've got an insurance business going on the side, and it is starting to grow nicely. Selling insurance fulfills me, in a way, like basketball. But basketball keeps calling me back. I suppose I'll play until I can't keep up with the kids any longer.

Ninety percent of the coaches in the NBA are guards, and there aren't very many big men people coaching, I happen to be one of them and when I coached, everybody on my team, including the guards, had a hook shot, so that it was their bail out shot.

In every game, there's three teams out there. There's the two basketball teams and the team of officials. If the two teams are evenly matched, it can come down to number of possessions. If one out-of-bounds call goes the wrong way, that can be the difference.

I think my broadcast partner Mike Gorman said it best. He said there's a generation of fans who know me as a player and there's a generation of fans who know me as a coach and now there's a generation of fans who think I'm Shrek!

Chuck Daly was a man and a coach who everyone had great respect for, and to be recognized in his memory is very special.

I play basketball for love and money, and they come in interchangeable order, depending on how things are going when you ask the question.

If I was going to get beat up, I wanted to be indoors where it was warm.

I don't know what it is about me: I am no Rock Hudson, but I absolutely wow all the little old white-haired ladies. They stop me and talk to me all over the country, on the street, in restaurants, in elevators.

I try to put all I am as a person into what I do. My intelligence, my emotion. I've done that in everything.