People around the NBA have talked about “Heat culture” for years as this venerated thing that all franchises hope to emulate. The results have spoken for themselves, as the Heat have won three titles and made the Finals thrice since Pat Riley arrived and instituted the famous franchise mantra. As LeBron James revealed in his wide-ranging interview on The Pat McAfee Show yesterday, though, there were some unseen drawbacks to Heat culture that still eat at him to this day.
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LeBron recounted a story to McAfee of how the Heat players always used to get warm chocolate chip cookies on their team flights, and just hearing him describe them (soft, with crispy edges) is enough to make your mouth water. One day, though, the cookie train came to a stop, and both LeBron and Dwyane Wade immediately knew why.
“Riles strikes again,” they communicated wordlessly, as they knew that team president Pat Riley had to be the one behind it. Riley has had unmatched success as a coach and executive, but it’s fair to say that he isn’t always the most player-friendly person out there, as we saw recently with the way things blew up between himself and Jimmy Butler.
LeBron also left the Heat on somewhat bad terms, with Riley saying he was “very angry” when LeBron left to go back to Cleveland. Two years later, Wade was gone too, and LeBron said in this interview that Riley’s decision not to pay Wade, who by that point was the greatest player in franchise history, was much worse than even taking his cookies away.
LeBron’s cookie story reveals the one shortcoming of Pat Riley’s time as Heat president
Riley is an old-school guy, a basketball lifer whose experiences range from being on the Kentucky team that lost the famous NCAA final to Texas Western to getting the Showtime Lakers off the ground. He has every reason to believe that his way is the right way, but he’s sometimes taken it too far with the Heat, to his own detriment.
LeBron infamously said that the Heat were going to win “not one, not two, not three” all the way up to “not seven” championships when he was introduced as a member of the Heat. That number ended up only being two, and he left Miami after just four years. He’s since won two rings elsewhere, one with the Cavs and one with the Lakers.
Just a month ago, Wade said on his Underground Lounge podcast that the cookie incident was when he knew LeBron was going to leave Miami.
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If Riley could have been just a bit more accommodating of his stars, maybe LeBron would have stayed and the Heat would have been able to become an unstoppable dynasty. Maybe Wade would have never had to wear another team’s uniform, having gone on to play for the Chicago Bulls and Cleveland Cavaliers before returning to Miami. Maybe Butler, who helped drag the Heat to two Finals, could have ended his career in Miami instead of going to Golden State and immediately turning the Warriors’ season around.
Sometimes a cookie is just a cookie, and sometimes it’s symbolic of a larger issue.
