Questions and reflections with Carlos Boozer
- Klas Stolpe
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
By Klas Stolpe
Juneau Independent
The following is from an interview with Carlos Boozer Jr. on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025, four days after he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Q: What is the most important lesson you have learned from the game of basketball?
A: This is basically the story of my book, just believing in yourself. I think ultimately one of the best things about team sports is that you depend on more than just yourself. You have to come prepared of course, but you also have to have your teammate prepared if you're going to have success. I think there's so many times, and you find this in the selfish players, when they only care about themselves but they don't care about their teammates. Those teams usually fail. You could be a team that has an incredible scorer who puts up 60 points a night or whatever it is, but they never win championships. What I learned about the game of basketball is sacrifice. I love being a part of a team and I applied it in every manner of life. Whether that's my immediate family or my ESPN family or my Utah Jazz family…there's so many lessons in basketball and I go back to my book…there are hurdles or speed bumps or moments you probably thought, ‘Maybe I should pivot.’ Well I had that at basketball too. There were hard moments trying to get over the hump and I could easily have had this dream as a kid and said, ‘You know what? I'm not going to, it's just too hard.’ My message is, find your people. I call it finding your tribe. Find like-minded people who believe in you, who wanna see you succeed, who want you to be at your best all the time, and it makes those hurdles that much easier to overcome, that much easier to get over. Because there's always gonna be roadblocks. Whether that be a teacher or maybe you don't have funding for your sport or maybe you get hurt and you have to wait a couple years — think about all the olympic athletes that train to make the Olympics and they get hurt right before the trials and they have to wait four more years to compete. Do they give up or do they keep training to get ready for the next Olympics. My biggest thing is perseverance. Through team sports, especially through the game of basketball, you learn how to overcome and you learn to be a part of a team and those are the two biggest things for me. And think about that, because of our TEAM I'm in the Hall of Fame now.
Q: What makes a good teammate?
A: There's so many things. I’ve played with guys who were just good at one thing…Think about a guy like Dennis Rodman. Probably the best rebounder in history. He did one thing really well. He rebounded. There are so many guys that are specialists. You think about a guy, like a California, who's just a knock-down three-point shooter, right? And he had a great NBA career just knocking down all the jump shots, you know? Then you got guys that could do multiple things well, you I'll see you next time. Guys that can defend and rebound and score, be dominant on both sides of the ball. Those guys are rare at the NBA level. You got those guys in high school and college, but at the NBA level, it's very rare to see a guy who can really dominate the game on offense and defense and have no flaws, right? So my biggest thing is a good teammate is somebody who does their job to help the team win. That's the biggest thing. Can you help the game win? And whatever your role might be. I don't know. Everybody's role is different. But everybody has the same workload. That's my prerogative. We all gotta work the same. We all got to show up to practice, get our work in, get our lifts in, get our shots up, run the sprints, stay in great shape. But our roles may be different on the court. Maybe one guy's an elite scorer, maybe one guy is an elite passer, maybe one guy’s an elite rebounder, but we all have the same workload, even though our roles might be different on the courts.
Q: No NBA championship. Is that something you think about or how do you come to terms with that?
A: We got close. To be honest in Utah we were probably a player away from beating Kobe and beating Tim Duncan…Me and Deron were really good, we both made the all-star team and we both averaged a lot of points, rebounds, and assists. But they had a little bit more. The Spurs and the Lakers had a bit more than we did in Utah. So we're probably a player away in Utah. In Chicago, we had everything. We had a superstar in Derrick Rose. We had some all-stars in myself and Joakim Noah and Luol Deng. We had a great bench mob with Nate Robinson and Taj Gibson. And we had every ingredient needed, but we didn't have health. And that's what stopped us from winning a championship. So I'm pretty honest with myself. I knew that I had a couple of opportunities throughout my career, and I lost to a better team and that happens sometimes. Sometimes I thought about maybe doing the Gary Payton thing and chasing it or doing the Karl Malone thing and jumping on some other teams that reloaded and chasing it but you know…my mom got breast cancer in 2015 and I decided to take a year off to be there for my mom. That's a big reason why I was so happy that my mom and dad got to see me get into the Hall of Fame, because there's some parents that weren't alive anymore. So I'm very blessed to have had my parents this long. I decided to go ahead and retire because I wanted to spend more time with my kids also. You miss a lot when you play in the NBA. So I was really happy to retire and get a chance to be there at practices and pickups and dropoffs at school and spend more quality family time.
Q: The game is a business, now way more than when you started in high school and college. How did you adapt to that?
A: For me it was more as a parent, right, because my kids are in the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) era. I wasn't in the NIL era, I was in a different era. But for my kids the good thing is they've been very fortunate not to have to worry about that, the money wasn't as big of an issue as being the right fit for them. So they picked the situation that was the best fit. They (twins Cameron and Cayden) turned down bigger offers financially to go to Duke because they knew it was the right place for them. The game has changed. You see a lot of legendary coaches are retired because it's a different ballgame. It's more transactional. But I'm happy for the players now…I’ll put it to you this way. There's 1% of athletes who are going to go on to the next level and be pros, but the majority of athletes are playing their last competitive games in college if you even get to that level to be able to play in college. So think about the guy who's a star in college. He's a really good college basketball, baseball, or football player. Now he could make a couple million dollars so that when he graduates or leaves college, he can still chase his dream, but if he falls short, he has the cushion to fall back on. Back in my day, everybody had to put all their eggs in one basket to be an athlete but the reality of it is not all of us are going to make it to the NBA, not all are going to be pros. So I actually like it from that perspective. If you have a guy who's a really good college player, he can make some money, instead of college making money off of the athlete, which has been going on forever. Some of these athletes can make some money on their name, image, or likeness to have a cushion when they leave college… Think about it, even if you're a regular college kid, you go to college, you bust your butt, you graduate, and then you leave college and you have student loans and you're in debt. So I actually like the NIL for the athletes who are not going to make it to the NBA or make it to the NFL.
Q: How can the passion for the game coexist in the NIL era?
A: Yeah, it can't be about the money, right? Like, I played for free. My kids would play for free, because they're in a great situation where they get paid and they get compensated for their actions and their play, but if it's about the money, you only go so far. You know, like, the great ones, they play for legacy. And that's what my kids are chasing. My kids are chasing legacy.
Boozer reflects on where he played
Duke: It was everything. I was one of the best players in high school my senior year and then I go to Duke and I'm playing with other guys who were also one of the best players when they were in high school, from Shane Battier to Jay Williams, Chris Duhon, to Dante Jones and Nate James, Mike Dunleavy and the list goes on. Every practice we're really going at it because we're competing for playing time, we all want to be stars. Some of our practices were harder than some of the games and then to win a championship my sophomore year like, ‘are you kidding me?’ I was mind-blown, just all the hard work and competition to be able to be successful and all those moments with Coach K and the lessons that he taught us, the challenges that he made us go through…just the limits that we didn't know we could get to, but he knew…
Cleveland: The day I heard my name get drafted, I was like, ‘Wow!’ It gives me chills right now talking about it because your dream is to hear your name get called and get drafted. And I got drafted and now you've got to go prove yourself among the best players on the planet. A new challenge arose…I worked my butt off and became a starter early in my rookie season in the NBA. I never let go. I started the rest of my career and for all the teams I played for. So I always thank Cleveland for drafting me and believing in me, and giving me a chance to live my dream.
Utah: A chance to play for Jerry Sloan, a Hall of Fame coach, and learn from legends like Karl Malone and John Stockton. They gave me a chance to be a star (he made the NBA All-Star team twice there, made the Olympic team and won a gold medal). Being out West I played against some of the best players to ever do it — Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Dirk Nowitzki. Utah is incredible for me. It holds a special place in my heart because I got there at 22 years old and they gave me the keys to the franchise. And then we drafted Deron Williams, CJ Miles and we had Mehmet Okur and Andrei Kirilenko…they built a great team…we fell short to Kobe Bryant, who's one of the top players that ever played, and we felt short to Tim Duncan, who was one of top players who ever played, so I still wish we would have won a championship, but the guys that beat us were pretty damn good.
Chicago: Oh man, did you see Derrick Rose in 2010? When I got to Chicago I had never seen a point guard be able to play like him. He was fast like Allen Iverson, but he jumped like Michael Jordan. All in one body. Never got tired. He won the MVP that year I got there and we won 62 games. I thought we had the best team in the league. We had a real shot to beat Miami in the Eastern Conference Finals, and LeBron and D. Wade ended up being really, really good, and they got on to the finals. And then, obviously, D. Rose getting injured, we didn't get a chance to get back to that level or surpass that. It's hard to win a championship without your best player. But he was unbelievable. And those years were awesome. The team that inspired me the most when I was a kid was Michael Jordan’s Bulls, and now I'm on the Chicago Bulls — just come on, I'm a kid from Alaska, bro. Like, to be in this realm, playing with some of the best players on the team, that I looked up to since I was a kid. That was a huge honor.
Los Angeles: To finish my career with Kobe Bryant in LA with the Lakers, come on, man. Like my favorite team after Jordan was the 2003 Kobe and Shaq team. They were just so dominant. They were fun to watch. Kobe became a really close friend of mine, a brother of mine. We worked out a lot in the offseason together. And to get a chance to play with him on the Lakers for a few games was pretty sweet to finish off my career.
Guangdong: That was fun, man. I got a chance to play overseas in Asia. They have such a love for basketball there. Stephon Marbury is a good friend and he was already playing over there, so he kind of took me under his wing when we got out there and showed me what China was all about after going there in Beijing and going to China and getting the gold medal. It was great. I had a great time in China. A lot of great fans and I still go back and visit every now and then and do a couple of camps.
• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@gmail.com.
