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Pat Riley is driving the salt truck

Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Thought if someone got the axe their posts were auto removed too?

Dunno. Maybe. Maybe it’s a temp ban? Or maybe he really is just hiding. *shrug* too lazy to actually check his account status
 
I just wrote a blog post about the Miami Heat's bench. They're actually a really fun bench to watch. I have a lot video analysis, so if you want to watch it, click on the link!

https://sportsbystats.com/2018/01/08/frustrating-and-fun-times-with-the-miami-heats-bench/

One thing that has been frustrating to me is the constant droning of how the Warriors have made the NBA season boring. Sure, more than likely everyone knows how it will end. But for the true basketball fan, there is a lot of fun teams, players, offenses, and coaches in today’s NBA. One of these teams are the Miami Heat.

The Miami Heat have struggled this year. Before Friday’s game against the Knicks, they were below .500 at home. Advanced metrics – such as ESPN’s RPM and basketball-reference’s SRS – suggest they play like an under .500 team. Yet, they have a 22-17 record and sit at the fifth spot in the East.

During the first month of the season, watching the opening six minutes of a Heat game was equivalent to watching paint dry. They started Goran Dragic, Dion Waiters, Josh Richardson, Justise Winslow, and Hassan Whiteside, and relied almost exclusively on the pick-and-roll.

Then, injuries hit, and Heat coach Erik Spoelstra started experimenting. When Whiteside was hurt, Miami started Kelly Olynyk and/or rookie Bam Adebayo in his place. Then, Dion Waiters’ troublesome ankle flared, and Justise Winslow hurt his knee, resulting in Tyler Johnson moving to the starting lineup.

Still, Miami’s starting lineup remains relatively boring. And frankly, players like Tyler Johnson, Dion Waiters, and Hassan Whiteside frequently make the wrong basketball play. This is anachronistic when one considers this is the team that, not so long ago, trotted out lineups with Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Chris Bosh, and Shane Battier.

But, after the first six minutes, Spoelstra makes substitutions, and the Heat become really fun to watch.

One lineup Miami uses is Goran Dragic and Josh Richardson with a bench unit of Wayne Ellington, James Johnson, and Kelly Olynyk. This lineup is +20 over 100 possessions. Additionally, Spoelstra has also used a lineup of Josh Richardson and Tyler Johnson with Wayne Ellington, Bam Adebayo, and Kelly Olynyk, and they are outscoring opponents by 33.4 points per 100 possessions.

...
 
Pat still has his CDL apparently...

5 LeBron James revelations from Heat president Pat Riley in new NBA book


Ben Rohrbach
Yahoo Sports

Here are the handful of highlights from Riley’s commentary, via ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan.

LeBron asked Riley if the ex-coach would take over for Heat’s Erik Spoelstra.
Maybe not in so many words, but that was the impression Riley got. Reports of an icy relationship between James and Spoelstra were widespread in the early days of their partnership, never more so than in 2010 when the former bumped the latter on his way into the timeout huddle.

Riley told Thomsen that he called James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh into his office the day after that bump occurred during a loss to the Dallas Mavericks that dropped their record to 9-8 a month into the 2010-11 season. The Heat president wanted to get a feel for how everyone was getting along.

“They just said, ‘We’re not feeling it,’ or something like that,” Riley told Thomsen, via MacMullan. “We talked about the typical things that we have to do, have patience and all of that stuff.

“And I remember LeBron looking at me, and he said, ‘Don’t you ever get the itch?’ I said, ‘The itch for what?’ He said, ‘The itch to coach again?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t have the itch.’ He didn’t ask any more questions, and I didn’t offer any more answers. But I know what it meant, and I always go back and wonder about what he was thinking at that time. He walked out scratching his leg like it was itching.”

Riley said the Heat trio also asked him about his interest in taking over for Spoelstra before teaming up in Miami. He was not interested. Spoelstra had coached Wade and the Heat to consecutive playoff appearances before the arrival of James and Bosh.

“Erik is a hell of a coach,” Riley told Thomsen.

Riley warned LeBron against ‘The Decision’
The Heat president told Thomsen that he warned James and his business partner, Maverick Carter, about the public relations nightmare that would ensue after James announced his decision to take “my talents to South Beach” in front of a live national TV audience on ESPN — how people might portray the move as LeBron running scared from making his own way in Cleveland to an easier path in Miami.

“And both of them, Maverick and LeBron, looked at me,” Riley said, according to MacMullan. “Like, ‘Fear? Afraid of what?’ They almost mocked me. This was a big decision. I was trying to tell them, ‘[Expletive is] going to hit the fan, man.’ ‘Afraid? Us?’ They had so much confidence in what they were doing, and they were so smart in a lot of ways.”

Riley said when it did hit the fan immediately following “The Decision”, LeBron “almost had tears in his eyes” when he arrived in Miami. That did not stop James from participating in a welcome party the next day in which he promised “not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven,” but an endless amount of championships. Riley told Thomsen he did not approve of that decision, either.

“I just think the euphoria of that moment and what all three of them had done had got to them,” Riley said, via MacMullan. “The serotonin level was going high. Some of the things that were said, I think they would take it back and be a little more humble if they could, and probably the same for us as an organization. But once it got going I was not going up on the stage to throw them off.

“How would that have been? I would have been booed out of the arena by 18,000 people.”

Riley sat deadpanned in the stands when cameras caught him after LeBron’s championship promise:

Riley believes James might have won ‘five or six championships’ if he stayed in Miami
The Heat president was not happy when he learned of James’ intention to return to Cleveland in 2014.

“I had two to three days of tremendous anger,” he told Thomsen, via MacMullan. “I was absolutely livid, which I expressed to myself and my closest friends. … My beautiful plan all of a sudden came crashing down,. That team in 10 years could have won five or six championships. But I get it. I get the whole chronicle of [LeBron’s] life.”

Knowing what we know now, five or six titles seems like a stretch. Since James left in 2014, the Heat have rebuilt on the fly, with Wade slowing down and Bosh being forced from the game due to blood-clotting issues. Spoelstra has the Heat in the playoffs this season, but it’s hard to imagine them winning four more titles this decade, given what the Golden State Warriors have since become.

Riley says LeBron ‘did the right thing’ returning to Cleveland
With the benefit of hindsight, the Heat president understands James’ motivation for going home.

“While there may have been some carnage always left behind when he made these kinds of moves, in Cleveland and also in Miami, he did the right thing,” added Riley, via MacMullan. “I just finally came to accept the realization that he and his family said, ‘You’ll never, ever be accepted back in your hometown if you don’t go back to try to win a title. Otherwise someday you’ll go back there and have the scarlet letter on your back. You’ll be the greatest player in the history of mankind, but back there, nobody’s really going to accept you.'”

It is interesting that Riley believes James would be “the greatest player in the history of mankind” had he remained in Miami. After all, the Heat president called Los Angeles Lakers legend Magic Johnson — with whom he won a handful of championships in L.A. — “the greatest player of all time” just last year.

Riley and LeBron have not spoken since their 2014 breakup.
The Hall of Fame coach told Thomsen that he did not contact James until Game 7 of the 2016 Finals, when he texted shortly after the Cavaliers took the floor against the Warriors, “Win this and be free.”

James never responded.

In the hours after delivering Cleveland its first NBA championship in 2016, James told ESPN.com:

“When I decided to leave Miami — I’m not going to name any names, I can’t do that — but there were some people that I trusted and built relationships with in those four years [who] told me I was making the biggest mistake of my career.

“And that [expletive] hurt me. And I know it was an emotional time that they told me that because I was leaving. They just told me it was the biggest mistake I was making in my career. And that right there was my motivation.”

Riley told Thomsen he said no such thing, lauding James for turning perceived slights into motivation.

We may have learned as much about Riley as we did LeBron from these excerpts. The ego is insatiable. This is, of course, the same man who said in September 2016 — a few months after sending James that text — that Shaquille O’Neal, not LeBron, was “bigger than any acquisition that we ever made, including the Big Three.” Sometimes the pride these men have is as much a curse as it is a blessing.

Then again, Riley and James probably don’t reach the heights of their professions without those qualities. It’s stories like these that should make Thomsen’s book, which comes out April 17, a great read — and the book James publishes on this era someday as anticipated as any NBA story ever told.
 

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