With the Miami Heat advancing to their NBA best seventh finals since 2006, the legendary resume of Heat President Pat Riley continues to grow. As a player, coach and executive, Riley has now made appearances in 19 NBA Finals. That’s good for an astonishing 25% of all NBA Finals in the history of the league and over 35% of all finals since the 1970 NBA Expansion Draft. Throughout all the changes the league has seen over the last sixty years, one thing that has always been consistent is “The Godfather” competing for championships.
Patrick James Riley was born and raised in New York where he played at Linton High School before going on to play for the University of Kentucky. After four seasons with the Kentucky Wildcats, Riley was selected not only with the 7th overall pick of the 1967 NBA draft by the San Diego Rockets, but also in the 11th round of the NFL draft by the Dallas Cowboys as a receiver prospect.
Riley made the wise decision to stick with basketball and was drafted again by the Portland Trailblazers in the 1970 NBA Expansion Draft. Shortly after the draft, Riley was traded to the Lakers and that’s where the legacy of “The Godfather” would begin. Riley would play a key role on the Lakers’ 1971-1972 championship winning team as well as the 1972-1973 team that lost in the finals. After being traded to the Suns during the 1975 season, Riley would make his third and final NBA Finals appearance as a player.
In 1977, Riley retired as a player and immediately moved into a broadcasting role back with the Los Angeles Lakers. Riley served as a broadcaster for the team until 1979 when a bicycle crash seriously injured Lakers’ Head Coach Jack McKinney. Assistant coach Paul Westhead took over the head coaching duties and hired Riley as the assistant coach of a team that ha d Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. This team went on to defeat the 76ers in the NBA Finals and earned Riley his first ring as an assistant coach.
Magic Johnson became increasingly upset playing under Westhead and demanded a trade early in the 1981 season. Rather than trade Johnson, Lakers’ owner Jerry Buss fired Westhead and Pat Riley went on to become the interim head coach. Riley, along with his star players, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, spearheaded the “Showtime” era of Lakers basketball. Riley would be with the Lakers until 1990, leading Los Angeles to seven finals appearances and four championships over that time.
Following his time with the Lakers, Riley would go on to coach the New York Knicks from 1991-1995. Riley would make another finals appearance in 1994 after defeating the three-timedefending champion Chicago Bulls in the conference finals. The Knicks would end up losing in the finals to the Rockets in seven games.
In 1995, Riley made arguably the most controversial move of his career and it is still paying off to this day. Riley stepped down from the Knicks and took over the Miami Heat as both the head coach and franchise president. Riley had full control of all basketball operations and immediately went to work building this budding expansion team. In 2005, after multiple playoffruns that came up short, Riley made the massive move to bring in superstar Shaquille O’Neal to pair with young all-star Dwyane Wade.
Although Riley had previously stepped back from coaching duties to focus on building the team as an executive, he took over again to lead the team to its first title in franchise history in 2006. This was the start of a nearly twenty year run of dominance by the Miami franchise that is still going. In 2008, Riley hired an up-and-coming assistant coach in Erik Spoelstra to take over coaching duties while Riley returned full time to the team president role.
The Heat have gone on to reach an NBA best seven finals since 2006 and have made some of the biggest free agency signings under the lead of Riley. Most notable was Riley bringing in Lebron James and Chris Bosh to join Dwyane Wade and create a “Big 3” that would reach four straight finals and take home two of them. While the signings that created the 2011-2015 Heat teams were incredible, the way that Riley and the Heat organization have constructed their more recently successful teams might be the most impressive thing he has done to date.
The Heat traded for Jimmy Butler and surrounded him with young, often undrafted talent that fit the ‘Heat Culture’ and have been in the conference finals almost every year since. The 2019-2020 team made the finals in the bubble where they fell to the Lakers. That Eastern Conference Champion Heat team was ledby Butler and two recently drafted players in Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro.
That success has continued as the Heat have reached the NBA Finals again this year while getting major contributions from an unheard-of number of undrafted players. This is Riley’s 19th Finals appearance overall and some have suspected it could be his final season if the Heat come out on top.
With the Heat’s NBA Finals run this year, Riley now has three finals appearances as a player, ten as a coach and six more as an executive. No matter the role or the era, Pat Riley knows what it takes to compete for championships in the NBA. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who has an NBA resume that you could even attempt to compare to that of “The Godfather”. Appreciate the greatness while you can, because the duration and consistency of Riley’s success is something we may never see again in any professional sports league.
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