Weeks following their loss in the NBA Finals, Pat Riley talked big about his Heat team, insisting things might’ve turned out different had the squad been healthy all the way through.
“I would like to see what it would be like with everybody whole. We’ll get our chance again. The Lakers have the greatest player in the game today in LeBron [James] and Anthony Davis.
They beat us fair and squarely. But there will be always be that asterisk; if we had Bam and Goran 100 percent — Goran was our leading scorer [entering the Finals] — it might have gone to a seventh game.”
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He later clarified the comments, saying the asterisk should be attached to the Heat, not the Lakers.
“The asterisk is next to the Heat’s name, not the Lakers,” Riley said in a statement. “Their title is legitimate. Our loss has an asterisk [next] to it. The Lakers were the better team. Period.”
Both Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic were out for multiple games in the series, obviously compromising Miami’s chances to win.
Had they stayed healthy, there’s no telling what they could have pulled off, especially considering the teams they beat to get to the Finals in the first place.
But, alas, we’ll never get the chance to see how that Miami roster would have squared up at full strength. Maybe next year?
