Top 50 Toni Kukoc Quotes

It is nice to start a game and feel the game from the beginning, but I have to pick up the pace when I come off the bench.

I always thought about the NBA.

I actually played a lot of other sports – table tennis and soccer for a long time.

It would be nice to play again for a team that has a great chance to win a championship.

My wife doesn’t want to go. She says, ‘I am your wife, I will do as a wife should.’ But she is worried about what she will do in Chicago, all by herself.

Obviously the game is more enjoyable when the ball is shared and everybody looks for each other on both ends of the floor.

War is not game. If you lose, you can be mad or sad two or three days. War makes you sad every day, every minute.

Sometimes in my mind I have a picture of something happening, and because the foot is not right it is harder to happen. I see the ball and I can see myself intercepting it or rebounding or doing this stuff, and it’s just not there. There’s not the movement or explosiveness.

When I was drafted by Chicago, I said, ‘Wow, it would be nice to play with those guys.’ I knew I’d have an automatic chance to win a championship.

I have always felt that I have to play with the ball to be the best player I can.

I feel as long as I’m playing productive minutes, I’ll play. But if I’m sitting on the bench and not doing anything, then I’ll retire.

When you reach triple-double, you know you were involved in every part of the game.

There is nothing personal between Pippen and me.

I am a basketball player. For me to sit on the bench at 21, 22, not what I wanted.

Obviously, when you come onto a team that’s playing in the Finals and the standards are so high that nothing but winning a championship is success, coming in new to that kind of environment, of course you’re going to put pressure on yourself.

I shot millions and millions of shots, just wanted the ball and felt good every time I released the ball, especially in those last seconds of big games.

Kevin Durant, to me in my personal opinion, is the best player in the NBA.

I always felt comfortable looking at the court.

Now if you ask me about coming from Europe, I would suggest to any young player interested in the NBA to not spend two or three years in Europe searching for money. Just give it a shot. You can always go back.

In Italy, my wife and I always said we feel like strangers because there’s maybe only a couple other people from other parts of the world. Here in Chicago, there’s millions of people from Poland, thousands from Japan, hundreds from Croatia. We like it here.

I have to go to the NBA and try.

Only Vlade Divac go first year he play. The rest of the guys from Europe sit on the bench.

I would say it was my fault, my choice to not allow people to know who I was. Places I went, people I knew, they knew the way Toni Kukoc was as a person and they all treated me great. Everyone else who just read the newspapers and tried to learn about me, I guess I was not that good of a guy.

At least I can say no player got as much attention from the Dream Team as I did.

I’ve been playing 10 years and I know it’s easier starting the game. You have the opportunity to play much more aggressively.

I know that three months before the season is not enough to become a good NBA player, but it’s a start.

It feels great to have the chance to play with the Chicago Bulls.

When my game is going well, everything gets much easier, offensively and defensively.

I worry for the future of the world. For my children.

There were games I would score five and games I would score 30, and sometimes the five points were way more important than the 30.

I love Scottie. The guy that helped me the most those first two years was Scottie. He is so easy to play with.

Everybody knows the NBA is the top of basketball in the world. The game here is more hard, more physical, faster than in Europe.

When some new guy wants to beat you, and you know you are better than him, you will make him see immediately who is the boss.

Sometimes I haven’t been happy, but it was never a problem with somebody around me. And winning, that helps a lot.

I never was anybody’s guy. I always was myself.

Maybe two or three years will be enough for me to grow into a good NBA player.

I thought those three years when we won championships, I really was good enough to play in the All-Star game. I felt I deserved to be in the top whatever that would be, the top 20-some players in the league. Really felt that comfortable and confident on the basketball court.

It is a much bigger thing to have a world championship with Chicago than this one in Italy.

I kind of expect that the people wouldn’t know me. I know I’m tall and I cannot escape that.

I would watch San Antonio play and see plays I recognized from the Russian team, the Yugoslavian team.

My thought is the only way I will have progress is in the NBA.

I have an easy way to explain the war. It’s a Croatian defending his country and a Serb attacking a Croatian country. With anyone who has a problem with understanding what’s going on, that is the easiest way to understand it.

It’s easy. You just shoot the ball and then hope it’s going to go in.

I think it’s very important for every player after a long season, whether it’s good or bad, to get total rest. Not just physically and mentally from basketball and the pressure on the court, but the pressures outside, too. Then, when you come back, everything’s exciting again.

My choice was either Chicago or Milwaukee. Milwaukee is going with a young team and Chicago is in need of a big guy, so that’s it.

Like everybody coming from Europe, I didn’t believe it at first, but you really need time to adjust. I thought it was going to be like going from Croatia to Italy. But you really need the time just to understand things here.

I have got to stay aggressive. When I have a shot, I have to take that shot.

Everyone has an ego. Even someone that doesn’t play one minute has an ego.

It’s not requirement to have a point guard, you can have skill players with 3 or 4 guys on the same team playing multiple positions.

When I first started playing, we practiced nine hours a day. Five and a half to six hours of those were working on the fundamentals.