Miami Heat: A Pat Riley trifecta should be enough to silence the critics

The Miami Heat are off to a 21-8 record and things are going swimmingly in South Beach. The man responsible for a great part of it though is Pat Riley.

The Miami Heat have started the season on a tear. They plucked the 19-9 Houston Rockets earlier in the season, after knocking off the 25-4 Milwaukee Bucks in their place in the second game of the season.

After taking a devastating defeat at the hands of the Philadelphia 76ers near the end of November, the Miami Heat returned to the Wells Fargo Center on last week to return the favor. This Miami Heat success, to a tune of a 21-8 record this season after at least two years of pure mediocrity, is due to a culmination of things. While that is something to discuss, what is most important here is the culminating figure here or more simply, Patrick James Riley.

Pat Riley has been the leader of the Miami Heat for a long while now, which means we can expect certain things from this organization. After seeing where they were over the past few years though, how did they now get to the seemingly splendid place that they are at now? It was due to a Pat Riley trifecta, not the pony kind, but the kind that shows he wasn’t horsing around.

Over the past few seasons, Miami Heat Nation has complained about a lot, but three things have reared their heads more than any others. The Miami Heat didn’t have a superstar.

The Miami Heat didn’t have enough shooting and scoring. The reason that people thought acquiring the first two mentioned would be next to impossible, a superstar and more shooting/scoring, was because we had a couple of really bad deals on the books for players who weren’t producing in comparison to what they were being paid. Well, Riley has made that complaint a moot point as well.

When it comes to acquiring a superstar, he did that this past summer. We didn’t know how he would do it, of course and again, with the slew of poor contracts on the books eating up cap space, but he got it done and in the process of starting to solve the cap space issue.

He was able to land Jimmy Butler, while almost simultaneously ridding the Miami Heat of He who is not to be named here, the former number 21 for the Heat. While Butler checked off the “landing a superstar” box, the “clearing cap” box was mostly checked by exodusing the current Trailblazers’ center.

While he wasn’t the only one that could be counted in that number, the rest of the scenarios have sort of taken care of themselves. Dion Waiters and James Johnson are the other two you typically hear mentioned, but I would say Johnson’s value isn’t in the things people typically like to look at like scoring, but in the auxiliary things that he brings to a team like toughness, physicality, and abrasive defense.

Waiters, on the other hand, is writing his own ticket out of Miami, no Riles assistance, finagling, or magic needed. Plain and simple, he can’t behave or continue to conform to the Miami Heat way, so it’s safe to assume his time is dwindling down in a Heat uniform. With that information, the “getting off some of the bad deals” box will be fully checked soon as well.

Lastly, you take a look at the “more scoring and shooting” issue that’s afflicted the Heat a ton over the past two seasons. Without cap space and without a superstar, it was impossible to see how we were going to achieve that. Pat Riley had other plans.

Across one summer, with the full-time additions of Jimmy Butler, Meyers Leonard (who came over in the Portland/he who is not to be named/Jimmy Butler situation), Kendrick Nunn, Duncan Robinson, and Tyler Herro, this Heat team has went from a pea shooter at times offensively to being full-on nuclear when they get going. Pat Riley did it mostly through shrewd moves and Riles magic.

He landed what Portland probably saw as a throw-in in Meyers Leonard, who not only is one of the best deep shooters in the league percentage-wise but who’s size and length can be used when applied correctly. He signed Kendrick Nunn on the last day of the season last year, because he obviously knew something we didn’t and boy, was he right.

He stashed Duncan Robinson for the most part and has now unleashed him on the league, watching him elevate to perhaps one of the best shooters in the league along the way. He drafted Tyler Herro, who many panned as an awful pick, but who’s looked like nothing but a steal since he first took the court for the NBA Summer League. He signed undrafted free agent Chris Silva out of South Carolina, who hits the court like a mad man, prompting the fanbase (mostly me) to beg for them to “Unleash the Silva!”

You can say what you want about Riles, but you can’t say is that “he’s washed” or that “Pat’s lost it”. His most recent trifecta of action-oriented rebuttals proves that, while also saying “ha!” on his behalf. That is why Pat Riley’s offseason trifecta has been more than enough to silence the haters.