LeBron James is going home to Cleveland and now Pat Riley is going to a place he never, ever imagined. He is going back to the proverbial drawing board, to rebuild the Miami Heat into a relevant team again.
With one fell swoop Friday, James showed his enormous power as the sporting world’s biggest star. You think the Spurs ran roughshod over the Heat in the Finals? LeBron brought down the Heat franchise all by himself. His announcement that he's headed back to northeast Ohio, where he is going to team up again with the most unlikely of partners, Dan Gilbert, was not totally unexpected. But it is still quite stunning.
“I'm not promising a championship,” James told Sports Illustrated's Lee Jenkins in making his announcement. “I know how hard that is to deliver. We're not ready right now. No way. Of course, I want to win next year, but I'm realistic. It will be a long process, much longer than it was in 2010. My patience will get tested. I know that.”
The move leaves Miami in shambles after it just made its fourth straight Finals, such a rare accomplishment that only the NBA’s two most famous franchises, the Celtics and Lakers, had ever managed to do it.
The Heat clearly panicked in re-signing Chris Bosh for a maximum contract at $118 million. Miami will also keep Dwyane Wade, but his physical decline was one of the major reasons that James opted to go back home.
In a way, it makes complete sense for James. He goes back to Akron. He tries to do right by all those Cavs fans who burned his jersey on the night of “The Decision” in 2010. He tries to deliver his home-area team the first title Cleveland has had in 50 years, since the days of Jim Brown.
But it also raises eyebrows. He rejoins Gilbert, who famously excoriated James for leaving four years ago in a classic piece of hate mail and is known as a first-class screamer and meddler. He joins a rookie GM in David Griffin who has never built a thing. His new coach, David Blatt, has never worked a second in the NBA.
LeBron picked that support staff over Miami? James sure did, and that alone had to floor Riley.
James didn’t pick the most stable place, as the Cavs fired two coaches and two GMs in the four years he played in Miami. But he picked home, and who can argue with that?
It’s still shocking to see this happen to Riley, one of the game’s top executives, an icon who successfully recruited James and teamed him with Wade and Bosh. That turned Miami, not much of a franchise before the Big Three arrived, with only one title, into the capital of the NBA.
The capital is really San Antonio, but from a superstar perspective, it’s been South Beach since 2010. Now Riley loses the best player in the sport, still in his prime, and Miami is back to being a football town.
So now the capital might be relocating to Cleveland, especially if the Cavs can swing a deal for Kevin Love. If not, James tries to win with young talent such as Kyrie Irving, who has never made the playoffs. He picked that cast, unproven in so many ways, over the aging Heat roster. For a guy whose M.O. is to go into every season looking to get a ring, that tells you a lot about what he thinks of where Wade and Bosh are in their careers.
“I’m going into a situation with a young team and a new coach,” James told SI. “I will be the old head. But I get a thrill out of bringing a group together and helping them reach a place they didn’t know they could go. I see myself as a mentor now and I'm excited to lead some of these talented young guys.”
Only a few weeks ago, Riley was still simmering about what went down against San Antonio and took his attack to James, challenging his four-time MVP not to run out of the first door he saw. Everyone says that irked James, but here’s what probably annoyed him even more: seeing how Wade’s gimpy knees and other assorted ailments hampered the team with all the practices and games he missed the past season.
For all the never-ending problems James likely saw with his buddy Wade and an aging team and some very unimpressive off-season additions, Riley likely still held out hope that James would be back, even after their meeting in Las Vegas on Wednesday night when James would not give Riley a commitment.
Then Friday around lunch-time the world — and Pat Riley — found out that LeBron James ran out of the first door he saw. The one marked “home.”
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