This is not, Pat Riley stresses, revisionist history. And it also is not, he insists, getting caught up in the moment that will have Shaquille O'Neal this coming Friday becoming the third former Miami Heat player to enter the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
"I'll say this, and I mean this," Riley says during a relaxed moment this past week, "Shaq's acquisition was bigger than any acquisition that we ever made, including the Big Three."
Bigger than LeBron James. Bigger than Chris Bosh. And bigger, Riley says, than the player who helped Riley turn around the franchise around upon their dual arrivals in 1995, Alonzo Mourning.
"Zo was big," Riley says, "but getting Shaquille changed everything for our franchise."
With James, Bosh and Dwyane Wade, the Heat advanced to four consecutive NBA Finals from 2011 to 2014, winning two championships. With Mourning, Riley took a second-tier expansion team into arguably the most compelling playoff rivalry of the late-'90s, Heat vs. New York Knicks.
But even after a contentious ending with O'Neal in 2008 that left the two sniping, Riley says at a moment such as this, with O'Neal about to be enshrined in Springfield, Mass., it is essential to appreciate the magnitude of the moment when O'Neal arrived in July 2004.
"The seminal moment," Riley says, "to really make us really, really legitimate. He turned our franchise around. He gave us real legitimacy."
Plenty will be said this week about the enormity of O'Neal: his stats, his dominance, his skills. But the Riley-O'Neal relationship proved to be as imposing as O'Neal's physique and ultimately as combustible as an O'Neal dunk. It provided a winding path through a mere 3{ seasons that included Riley offering up everything and anything but Wade in a trade with the Los Angeles Lakers, stepping in as O'Neal's championship coach, and then a contentious parting, fences mended only recently to make this coming Friday a commemoration for Riley as well as O'Neal.
And it almost never happened for Riley.
At least not in Miami.
The coming Friday's inductions well could have been a Lakers-only moment, because of the respect that Riley held for O'Neal and for O'Neal's legacy even before their partnership in South Florida.
In June 2004, by then working in the sole role of Heat president after abdicating his Heat coach responsibilities to Stan Van Gundy, Riley was granted permission by Heat owner Micky Arison to meet with Lakers owner Jerry Buss to discuss the Lakers' coaching vacancy created by the departure of Phil Jackson.
"We sat and we talked about the team," Riley says. "And I remember the one conversation that came up and I asked them the question, I said, 'What about Shaquille and Kobe?' And they said ... "
Riley pauses, as if conjuring the tension of two decades earlier between O'Neal and Kobe Bryant.
"They really didn't want to talk about it," he says of the meeting with the since-deceased Lakers owner. "And I said the only way that I could come and coach the team is they give me a chance to put these two back together, to build this relationship and to keep this thing going forward, because I thought with their team, and what they had just accomplished, that they could win more championships together in Los Angeles.
"And right after that, we all went upstairs to dinner and that was the last I heard about them wanting me to coach _ but they definitely would like to make a trade with us. So I don't know if he brought me out there to really coach the team, or if he brought me out there to speculate on whether or not we would trade Wade and Caron Butler and everything else. And I said no. But when they called back, when Mitch (Kupchak, the Lakers' general manager) called back, there is no doubt we had interest and that then formulated into an offer and then a trade that was made for Caron and Lamar (Odom) and Brian Grant with the first-round pick. And we ended up getting Shaq and we ended up getting the championship."
The championship would arrive in 2006. But there was a more immediate challenge. Before signing off on the trade, O'Neal, whose contract was expiring in two years, sought an immediate meeting with Arison. That left Riley as middle man, with Arison in the Mediterranean at the time.
"I called Micky on the phone," Riley says. "I said, 'Micky, Shaq wants to come and visit you.' And he said, 'Well, we've got a boat full of guests.' And he had to charter another boat for me to stay on next to his boat. And he had to build the bed on the Mylin an extra foot out for Shaq and Shaunie to be able to sleep. And the boat was not big enough for Shaq, so Shaq ended up sleeping down in the salon most of the nights, on the floor."
From there, the Heat would rise to that first championship, O'Neal fittingly arriving to AmericanAirlines Arena for his introductory press conference in a championship-style parade, super-soaking the awaiting fans upon his entrance.
"We had been 10 years into this and we did very well, we were very competitive," Riley says. "I think we changed the culture in Miami. I think the Knicks series was a compelling playoff series for three years in a row. We ended up losing. But I said, 'You know what? We got to go for it.' "
Soon, Riley was all in, as well, returning as Heat coach in December 2005, amid speculation of O'Neal forcing Van Gundy's ouster.
"No," Riley says, "he never asked me and he never asked Micky that, 'I want Pat to coach.' That never happened. He never threw Stan under the bus.
"There's been a lot of speculation about that. I'm the president of the team. And as the president of the team at that time, I'm sort of the caretaker, but also I've got eyeballs. I know what's going on. I know what that team needed. And we didn't have a lot of time, three or four years from that standpoint."
It turned out, there would be only that single electrifying championship playoff run with O'Neal. By 2006-07, the Heat was a 44-38 team, done in the first round of the playoffs. By 2007-08, the Heat careened to 15-67, with O'Neal dealt to the Phoenix Suns at midseason. By then, the Riley-O'Neal relationship had deteriorated, Mourning at one point coming between the two at a practice when they appeared on the verge of trading blows.
"I've had a lot of dustups with players, all of them, every single one that I've ever coached, every superstar, every Hall of Famer," Riley says. "There were disagreements at times. These are great players. I'm demanding and those are demanding players. So sometimes things would cross the line, with me to them and them to me. But when Shaq left, it was not on the best terms, but it was best for everybody. And there wasn't any one thing. It was just time."
And then time healed the wounds. And then Riley announced that the Heat this season will retire O'Neal's No. 32, the team's third jersey to be raised to the rafters at AmericanAirlines Arena, alongside Mourning's No. 33 and Tim Hardaway's No. 10.
And now O'Neal will again be alongside Riley, as a member of the Hall of Fame, to be inducted in a class that also includes Allen Iverson, Yao Ming and Sheryl Swoopes, joining Mourning and Gary Payton as the only former Heat players so honored.
Ironically, this time it will be Riley in the Mediterranean alongside Arison, unable to attend O'Neal's induction.
But forever appreciative.
"When he wanted to dominate a game and have an impact on winner," Riley says, "there was no better."
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