Riley scrambles to cover asterisk
Pat Riley should know better. It’s hard to imagine Riley, the Miami Heat president who is 75 years old and inarguably wise, doesn’t know better.
Which makes the fuss over his weekend media brouhaha all the more fascinating. Perhaps you saw the headlines. The Miami Heat president, at one point in a Zoom press conference that lasted about 45 minutes, said an “asterisk” will always to be attached to the result of the bubble NBA Finals. No, he wasn’t suggesting the typographical signifier be placed on the season because of the unprecedented circumstance of coronavirus-induced shutdown followed by an interminable Disney residency. He was making the point that, though he acknowledged the L.A. Lakers beat the Heat “fair and square,” the injuries that limited the contributions of two of Miami’s three best players — Goran Dragic and Bam Adebayo — will always leave doubt about an alternate outcome.
“(The Lakers) were the best team. But there’s always going to be that asterisk, that caveat,” Riley said. “If we had Bam and Goran — Goran was our leading scorer in the playoffs — at 100 per cent, it could have gone to seven games or whatever.”
That comment, as you’d imagine, was widely interpreted as an unvarnished expression of sour grapes, Riley’s lingering bitterness about LeBron James leaving the Heat on public display. Terence Ross, the former Raptor now playing for the Orlando Magic, responded on social media with a trio of salt-shaker emojis. As in: Ol’ Man Riley’s awfully salty about that loss, huh?
Thankfully the Miami media came to Riley’s speedy defence. It was pointed out by more than one South Florida-based writer that Riley’s comment was twisted out of context. “Asterisk,” after all, was just one word in a three-minute answer to a question in which Riley engaged in a long preamble about the cruelty of untimely injury — and about how it ultimately can’t be used as an excuse. And fair enough. Riley did say all those other things. But that doesn’t mean he also didn’t slip in an ungracious jab, too.
Indeed, what was largely overlooked by his defenders is that almost none of Riley’s remarks would have drawn anything more than passing attention beyond Miami’s fan base had Riley avoided using one of the most combustible words in sports: Asterisk.
Anybody who’s been involved in the pro game as long as Riley knows that few things will inflame a situation more quickly than by dropping the A-word. There’s no other way to take it.
A flip through a dictionary will tell you as much. An asterisk, used in a sporting context, is “something that makes an achievement less impressive or less complete,” according to the folks at Cambridge. Over at Merriam-Webster it’s “appended to something (such as an athletic accomplishment included in a record book) typically in order to indicate that there is a limiting fact or consideration which makes that thing less important or impressive than it would otherwise be.”
You can understand why more than a few fan bases, even beyond Lakerland, were outraged by Riley’s implication. If the Heat could tack an asterisk to their loss, or L.A.’s win, or whichever — what kind of typographical signifier could the Golden State Warriors attach to the Raptors’ 2019 title, which, as impressive as it was, only came after the Warriors were debilitated by injuries to Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, among others. (The Warriors, to their credit, kept the woe-is-us act to a minimum and took a fullpage add in this newspaper to congratulate Toronto on its first championship).
And when would the asterisks stop? Tack one on to the Warriors’ first championship of their recent trio, in 2015, because the Cavaliers lost Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving to the trainer’s table.
Slap one on Cleveland’s win in 2016 because the Warriors had Steph Curry limping around on a wobbly ankle. Delegitimize the Warriors’ other couple of championships because Durant inflicted irreparable harm to the league’s competitive balance by coming aboard a Golden State superteam. It would never end, really.
Which hasn’t stopped NBA alpha males from tossing “asterisk” around as a statement of disrespect through the ages. Phil Jackson did it to minimize the San Antonio Spurs’ first championship in 1999, calling that lockout-shortened, post-Michael Jordan campaign an “asterisk season.” Jackson backed it up, mind you, by coaching the Shaq-Kobe Lakers to a title in each of the following three seasons. And there was enough chatter around the Finals defeat of another Riley team — the 1989 Lakers, who lost both Magic Johnson and Byron Scott to injury — that the team that beat those Lakers spent plenty of time having to validate its victory.
“I don’t want to see an asterisk by this championship,” Pistons coach Chuck Daly said at the time. “They lost two key players and that was unfortunate, but that’s a class organization over there and you won’t see them make any excuses.”
If Daly sounded like he couldn’t be sure about that last statement, old-timers will remember that the circa-1989 version of Riley did point out that the beat-up Lakers were “like a car with two wheels off” — never mind that the Lakers defeated the Pistons the previous year with Isiah Thomas hobbled by a bum ankle.
“What could have been (had the Lakers been healthy) is something that will go down in the record books,” Riley said at the time. “There’s no asterisk next to (the Pistons’) championship; they deserve it.”
That’s the only way to look at these things. Injuries happen. The strong survive. The best ability is availability. If Riley knew it then, he must know it now. So maybe he didn’t mean to spend this past weekend publicly sowing a seed of doubt about the legitimacy of the Lakers’ win. Maybe he doesn’t harbour the slightest bit of ill will toward James for leaving Miami. Maybe it’s plausible he simply got careless with an inflammatory word and endeavoured to clarify it.
Except, about that clarification, which came after the internet blowback from his initial use of the A-word.
“The Lakers were the better team. Period … Their title is legitimate. Our loss has an asterisk (next) to it,” Riley said in a statement meant to tamp down the fire he’d started.
Yes, he actually said it again. Asterisk. Maybe it didn’t occur to Riley that if he’s saying there’s an asterisk next to the Heat’s loss, he’s also saying there’s an asterisk next to the Lakers’ win. Maybe it didn’t occur to him that you can’t logically have one without the other. Or maybe he said exactly what he meant.