When LeBron James left the Heat last summer to take his talents back to Cleveland and the Cavaliers, a lot of people were surprised. But you could argue that no one was more surprised than Pat Riley, the Heat's team president. He helped orchestrate the deals that brought LeBron and Chris Bosh to Miami in 2010, and he thought that LeBron had the chance to do something "historic" with the Heat. So during a recent interview with Bleacher Report, Riley talked about how surprised he was when LeBron walked.
"Generational teams stay together," he said. "The players stay together. They know what they have. They see what they've won. They see that there's going to be a little bit of an adjustment here, and they don't want to leave that. You may never get it again. That was the most shocking to me, that the players would allow that to happen. And I'm not just saying LeBron. I mean, the players, themselves, would allow them to get to a state where a guy would want to go home or whatever it is."
Riley then went on to explain that the new generation of NBA players handles things differently than previous generations.
"So maybe I'm dealing with a contemporary attitude today of, 'Well, I got four years here, and I think I'll go up there for whatever reason I went.' You know, the whole 'home' thing, I understand that," he said. "But what [LeBron] had here, and what he had developed here, and what he could have developed over the next five or six years here, with the same team, could have been historic. And usually teams from inside…It would be like Magic and Kareem and [James] Worthy, they weren't going to go anywhere. They had come at a time when there were free agents. They weren't going to go. You think Magic was going to leave Kareem? You think Kareem was going to leave Magic?…No, they knew they had a chance to win every year. And this team had a chance every year. So that was shocking to me that it happened."
Riley also said that he has "moved on" from the LeBron era in Miami. But in the Bleacher Report feature, he sounds like a guy who's not quite sure what the future holds for him or the Heat.
You can read the whole thing here. He makes some pretty good points about LeBron leaving and what that says about the current crop of NBA players.
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[via Bleacher Report]
