Jason Williams sounds off on his Duke career

Former Blue Devil Jason Williams was enshrined in the Duke Athletics Hall of Fame Friday night. Here are some excerpts of Williams' speech as well as some thoughts he shared with members of the media before the ceremony about his favorite Duke memories and his current relationship with the program.

Williams on the honor of being inducted into the Duke Hall of Fame:

"It didn't click until a couple of days ago when everybody else started to talk to me about it. I do quite a bit of traveling and random people were coming up to me, congratulating me for being introduced into the Duke Hall of Fame. People on Twitter are starting to talk about it, and there came a point where I kind of realized wow, this is a really big thing. This place is always going to be home to me, and to have my jersey in the rafters and to be introduced this way is an amazing, amazing accomplishment that I"ll remember for the rest of my life."

"He is still one of the most competitive people I've ever met. He is very much committed to his job, and that's his life. Seeing the other aspect of it: the countless hours of film that he watches, the conversations with the coaching staff that he has, how he tries to implement different motivational tactics with different players—it's never the same strategy for everybody. It's a different strategy for each individual because he has to understand how to light a fire."

"It's been such a privilege for me to get to know Mike a little bit. I never thought I'd be in that position to call my coach by his first name. I will always call him coach, but the more and more time I spend away from here and the more I come back, I get to see him for who he is instead of the coach."

"One memory was when Coach K was trying to imitate Carlos Boozer, put on a wave cap, chewed his gum real slow and sagged his pants. That will forever be a memory."

"I remember my sophomore year after we won the championship I had an opportunity to go into the draft. It was a defining moment in my life, and my parents were great and really didn't try to force my hand. We sat down and wrote out a list of all the pros and the cons, and then I was in a room alone with Coach K. And a lot of people would think that Coach K would try to force my hand and get me to come back to school. And he looked me in the eye and said 'I'm not going to try and force your hand one way or the other, I just dare you to be great. I dare you not to be the norm. You talk about wanting to be brilliant, you talk about wanting to be a pioneer, here's an opportunity for you to blaze your own path.' It was really a defining moment in my life because it was the first time I had my own decision as a man, at 18 or 19 years old, and I chose to stay. I chose to be there for him. I chose to graduate school in three years. And that said everything about my life, because a lot of people come up to me and they say 'I'm sorry you're not playing anymore.' And I say, 'There's nothing to be sorry about. Basketball wasn't my default plan. What I did here—that's my main plan.'"

"He continues to impress me. He continues to reinvent himself. Even with this year's team, Rodney Hood and Jabari Parker is very similar to how he was at USA Basketball. Tyson Chandler wasn't a center—Tyson Chandler had to be on the perimeter and set screens, and that's how he's going to use Amile Jefferson and Marshall Plumlee. There's still no spots. You're still not a point guard, you're not a shooting guard—you're a player, and you have to understand every position on the floor. I think he gets a lot of that from business, too. That's what great CEOs do—you understand what your marketing director is doing, your CMO your CFO. You have to understand every capacity of your business, so a lot of similarities."

"I'm excited to see this year's team. I really am. I knew what you were going to get last year with Mason Plumlee and Ryan Kelly and Seth, you knew they weren't going to be a fast-paced, high-octane offense, they're going to slow it down and you have guys space out the floor and pound the ball down low. With this year's team, this reminds me of our team. You have a guy like Jabari Parker who is multi-talented, multi-skilled, who can play multiple positions, Rodney Hood who is a great slasher who can rebound and post people up. I don't remember the last time a Duke team has been able to pick a team up full court and actually try to turn them over. You haven't seen that for a while, and that comes with having Quinn Cook, Tyler Thornton, Rasheed Sulaimon, Matt—you have all these guys who are able to do that, and I think that allows [Krzyzewski] to get back to what teams were in the late 90s. That's how we played—we would try to turn you over 18, 19, 20 times per game. You hear Quinn Cook talk about the way they train and the style of pace they want to play at, that's more typical Duke pace in my mind over what they've been doing in the last couple of years."

"I had to connect from the Bahamas through Miami, and on my flight from Miami to Raleigh-Durham, I had the pilot come out and say that 'Hey listen, I just have to tell you that I'm a Terp fan. It still hurts me to this day, but you're a hell of a player.' So I'm constantly reminded of it. I kind of forgot about it, but I guess some things will always go down in history."