Now that Heat-in-five is mathematically impossible and everyone who took Miami in this series is beginning to look at least a little provincial toward Eastern Conference bump-and-grind basketball, I think a confession is in order:
I was brainwashed and snookered, taken in by all those Pat Riley stories over the years. Every single great anecdote about the man who ushered in the era of the uber-coach had me and people of my gullible ilk thinking Heat by psychological knockout. No way Riley waits 12 years to get back to the NBA Finals and a team featuring Shaquille O'Neal plays this poorly.
We thought his immaculately tailored suits alone were worth one win. Riles strutting down the sideline in Armani against some young coaching upstart like Avery Johnson just had mismatch written all over it. After an initial setback in Game 1, Riley's competitive will would eventually manifest itself in his players, and one of them would lay some wood on Dirk Nowitzki or Josh Howard, and that would be it. Dallas would get punked and the master motivator would triumph again.
If he couldn't win with his talent, he would muck up a series like 1994 when neither the Knicks nor the Rockets broke 100 points over seven games.
The past, it turns out, was the problem with Riley's cult following. We were drinking Kool-Aid from 12 years ago in New York or 18 years ago in Los Angeles. When a coach gets a team to the Finals in eight of his first 14 years, you just take it for granted that his players compete hard and play smart.
But then you watch Antoine Walker taking another herky-jerky bad shot, Jason Williams unable to complete an entry pass into the post and pulling up for a 3-pointer when he's got Alonzo Mourning running the floor. You watch James Posey making every dumb play imaginable and no Heat player realizing that the most dominant player of his era is three feet from the rim, calling for the ball, well, something is amiss in the coaching-legend business.
Riley will say it's not the Heat; it's the stupidity. And he will be right about how his players fell behind 0-2 in the series and now will try and become only the third team in NBA history to rebound from that deficit in the Finals. And at this moment, Shaq does not resemble the two players who led those teams back from that deficit: Bill Russell in 1969 or Bill Walton in 1977.
But thus far, you just expected more from a team coached by Pat Riley. He spoke before Game 2 about how much he's changed over the years, how he's no longer the selfish, go-getting dictator who lorded over those Laker and early Knick teams.
"I was ambitious," Riley said. "I was an ambitious young man. No, you change over the years and thank God I have. I think I'm a much better person today than I was back in the '80s, I think. That's my personal opinion."
I want the Gordon Gekko character back. I want the guy who once asked his players how much they really wanted to win and proceeded to submerge his head in a bucket of ice for two minutes, until the veins in neck and forehead were about to burst and his players were about to pull him out. Emerging from the water, his face frozen pink, he blurted out, "You got to want it till your last breath!"
I want the guy who once heard Charles Smith was dogging it with the Knicks, remaining on the injured list while his teammates busted their behinds during the regular season. When Smith walked into the locker room in a resplendent suit while Anthony Mason, John Starks and the other Knicks were suiting up, Riley turned around and stopped writing on the chalkboard and asked Smith, "Charles, if you give me one minute tonight — one minute — to win a championship, could you do it?"
Smith shrugged his shoulders and said, "Yeah, sure coach."
Riley went back to the chalkboard for a couple of seconds and then spun around dramatically. "Then what in the hell are you doing in that suit?" Charles Smith would soon come off the injury list and begin competing again.
I want the guy who once heard Todd Day was criticizing the way Riley ran practice in Miami, and how Riley called an air-it-out team meeting. He asked the entire locker room, "Does anybody, anybody at all, have a problem with how I run this ship?"
No one raised their hand. Finally, Riley said: "How about you Todd Day? Do you have a problem? You know what, you're cut. Get out of here."
After a near altercation, with Day explaining that Riley could not just do that, he had union rights, after all, Day was removed and the locker room grew still.
"Now," Riley said, "does anyone else have a problem with how I run this ship?"
That's the Riley I want to see at these NBA Finals, the man who wouldn't back down to any player, referee or opponent, the Riley whose teams looked much more competitive than these lackadaisical souls, the Riley who made us all believe in his motivational magic.
As it is now, it's time to revise our predictions, realizing we were living in the past and give Dallas its due.