Motivation Quote by Abe Lemons

Abe Lemons is puncturing the mythology that wins are engineered on a chalkboard. “I don’t have any tricky plays” is a deliberate deflation of the coach-as-mastermind pose, the kind of line that lands hardest in a culture obsessed with “systems” and secret sauce. He’s saying: you can spend all week drawing up misdirection, or you can recruit and develop people who can create misdirection on their own.

The kicker is the shift from plays to players. “Tricky” sounds like a gimmick until it’s attached to human beings. Then it means adaptable, sly, improvisational - athletes who read the floor, bait defenders, change pace, and make decisions under pressure. That’s not anti-strategy; it’s a reordering of priorities. Lemons is implicitly skeptical of overcoaching, the anxious impulse to control every possession. A “tricky play” works once, maybe twice, until scouting catches up. A “tricky player” keeps inventing new problems for the opponent in real time.

There’s also a recruitment and leadership subtext: stop chasing complexity, start building trust and skill. Coaches who lean on clever schemes can hide weak fundamentals; Lemons is betting the opposite. In the context of mid-to-late 20th-century basketball, when set offenses and sideline play-calling were treated as proof of sophistication, he’s making a populist, slightly contrarian claim: the smartest advantage is talent empowered, not choreography perfected.