■ I was a very emotional player. That’s just who I was. I couldn’t sleep after wins. I couldn’t sleep after losses. I took things to heart. If I had been more steady in my emotions, would I have been able to play longer? Absolutely.

■ Players ask me, “What fueled you to play with that fire?” My father was one of the most famous people in France, and I was living under his shadow. I wasn’t going to let that happen. But still to this day, when I’m in France, I’m not Joakim; I’m Yannick’s son.

■ When I walk the streets of Chicago, people thank me for my service — almost like I came back from war. I played for other teams, but for some reason the way I played here resonated.

■ I grew up in New York City, and the culture of playing streetball there shaped my life. You can imagine being a kid from Paris and having aspirations to play at the highest level. You know how many people put me down, saying, “Yo, you’re a private-school kid with privilege. There’s no way you’re getting to the NBA.”

■ My dad would wake me up in the morning and say, “OK, let’s go for a run.” He was like, “Even though you don’t like it, the reason you’re doing this is that no other kid in your school is doing it. And at the end of your run, you’re going to sprint. Your hands are going to be on your knees. You’re going to be tired. And the more you do it, the more you’ll get comfortable with being tired. Then on the court when there’s a guy better than you but he’s tired, you’re like, Oh, I have a third lung right now.” That’s confidence.

■ Those February games are hard on your body and on your mind. Everybody in the locker room is exhausted. So how, as a collective, do you fight through that? Sometimes talking a little shit gets the guys going. It wasn’t to belittle people — it was more to get my team on the right track.

■ The beauty of women’s sports right now is the rivalry. The guys are so friendly that it’s harder to have that. Competition is what makes this whole thing exciting, not this buddy-buddy stuff.

■ When the lights go off before the game and you hear the Bulls music — I’ll never feel that ever again. Or going on an 8–0 run, the other team calls time-out, you’re running back to the bench, you don’t even feel your legs because you’re so charged up — I’m never going to be able to replicate that. That was almost 15 years of my life. And from one day to the next, it’s gone. It’s like, OK, where do you put this energy?

■ I watched the documentary The Interrupters and tweeted about it. The next day, I was having dinner with Cobe Williams, one of the stars, and we’ve connected ever since. All the work I’ve done in the community is through him. We decided to do a peace league at Father Pfleger’s gym at St. Sabina. People thought that it was a terrible idea to have guys from different backgrounds playing basketball against each other. But being in that gym was the most inspiring thing I’d ever done.