Pat Riley is one of the greatest coaches in NBA history, with a resume that includes 5 NBA titles and 3 Coach of the Year awards. Riley’s coaching career began all the way back in 1979 when he was brought on board as an assistant for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Riley would take over as head coach in 1981, and he enjoyed tremendous success right away. He ushered in the era of the Showtime Lakers, with his first seven seasons at the helm seeing him lead the team to four championships, and they made it to at least the Conference Finals on all seven occasions. He would coach the team for two more seasons after that before stepping down in 1990. It was rumored at the time that his relationship with his players had deteriorated, and Jeff Pearlman, author of Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, once told GQ that the team had started to loath Riley toward the end of his tenure.
via GQ:
“By that time, Riley was well on his way to becoming something he hadn’t always been—an egomaniacal “genius” (sorta self-proclaimed) who was no longer in on the joke. See, that’s the thing that kills a lot of sports figures that go from cool to dolt—they forget how none of this is especially important. Guys who have perspective, who realize making millions of dollars to dress in glorified pajamas and catch a round object, are the ones who sustain and rarely wear out their welcomes. Riley once was that guy, and somewhere along the way he bought into his own hype. He began treating players like children, even when they were in their 30s. He stopped listening to suggestions. By the end of his time as the head coach, he was genuinely loathed by Laker players who thought his whole act had grown stale. He wasn’t a genius. Merely a really excellent hoops coach.”
A lot of people in Riley’s position would have also had all that success go to their heads. It is easy to see why he would start thinking a bit too highly of himself, and it ended up being his downfall. He would go on to coach for another 15 seasons with the New York Knicks and Miami Heat but would only win one more title. Riley was a great coach, and the Knicks, as well as the Heat, had some great teams, but at the end of the day, they tended to lose to teams that just had more talent than them, like the Bulls led by Michael Jordan.
Magic Johnson Called Pat Riley The Greatest Coach Ever
While he may well have had some issues with Riley toward the end of their time on the Lakers, Magic Johnson still had some high praise for his former coach. Magic called him the greatest coach ever and added that the Showtime Lakers could beat any team in NBA history.
That team obviously had Magic and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, two men who are almost universally recognized as two of the five best players in NBA history. No other team can really boast of having two of the top five players playing for them at the same time and to go with those two, the Lakers also had James Worthy, Jamaal Wilkes, Michael Cooper, Byron Scott and we can just go on and on. Scott also stated that they would have beaten Jordan’s Bulls, and we wish we could have seen these teams face off at their absolute best.
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