Pat Riley Is Going For It, For Better Or For Worse

Miami has been of two minds on the anti-aging serum that is Pat Riley for about a decade now, roughly since LeBron James pissed off back to Cleveland. This is mostly because 1) Riley was getting old, except of course facially, where he’s been 45 since he was 20, and 2) because he didn’t get another generational player to replace LeBron. The Miami Heat reached two NBA Finals in that intervening decade, as a five-seed and an eight-seed, with Jimmy Butler as their best player, and that is not nothing. But Riley’s apparent reluctance to swing from his ass for one last megascore became a prime talking point on South Beach as the team gradually receded into the thick Southeast Division underbrush; this did not make for a flattering contrast with the Florida Panthers slapping together two championship parades and more recently cornering the market on Tkachuks. The Panthers were the team that Went For It Without Fear, and the Heat were either too sclerotic or too committed to their specific bit to do the same.

No longer. Today, Riley is the CEO of Team LFG, screwing up his 81-year-old courage and throwing a slew of picks at the comically desperate Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bobby Portis. While guessing at the mortality of others is a particularly crass way to make a point, it is fair to say that Riley views this as quite likely his last chance to be Shohei Ohtani. Whether his feelings today include finding satisfaction in bumping Panthers GM Bill Zito down to the Kyle Schwarber tier is a matter for the Giannis presser, but that must surely count too. Either way, he’s swinging for the fences.

The gamble is clear enough. This is a turbo-all-in by a team that has gotten rather farther than it had any right to think was possible by not doing that, and largely by doing a lot with less. But history gets old fast, and the two Finals appearances in 2020 and 2023 might as well have been 1951 and 1954, when the Rochester Royals and Syracuse Nationals were the zenith of New York basketball. In the last three years, the Heat have not only not advanced out of the first round but have been passed in the Southeast standings by first Orlando, then Atlanta, and most recently Charlotte. The only team left is Washington, and being worse than the Wizards is a call from the clinic.