NBA legend Dwyane Wade spent the majority of his career with the Miami Heat. He won three championships with the franchise and has a statue outside the Kaseya Center.
Wade, who won the 2006 Finals MVP Award, had a falling out with Miami president Pat Riley in the summer of 2016 when he was an unrestricted free agent. Riley didn’t want to pay Wade the money the guard was looking for, so Wade left the Heat for the Chicago Bulls.
Riley, though, traded for Wade in 2018 when the future Hall of Famer was on the Cleveland Cavaliers. The two basketball icons patched things up and are in a good place again.
Unfortunately for Heat fans, Riley messed up again, this time with Jimmy Butler. He didn’t sign Butler to an extension last summer and things got so bad between Riley and Butler that Butler requested a trade this season and was suspended by the team three times.
Miami eventually traded Butler to the Golden State Warriors, who are the seventh seed in the West. The Heat, meanwhile, need to win two play-in games to make the playoffs.
Speaking with Anthony Chiang of The Miami Herald, Wade spoke about Riley’s management style in South Beach.
“I think every generation that he’s been a coach in, he’s had to adapt,” Wade said. “I don’t think he’s ever lost his true identity and that is something that you don’t want him to lose. I’ve talked about that very candidly. Yeah, there are some things that you look at it and you say, OK, there’s a little micromanaging going on. Micromanaging sometimes it feels petty. So if you’re petty and I’m petty, then we’re going to get petty. But I think along his time, he’s tinkered from the Lakers to New York and to Miami and the different generations in Miami. I definitely saw a different Pat from Day 1 when I walked in to the last day I was there. So there have definitely been adjustments, but he has not and the organization has not lost their true identity overall when it comes to how it’s run and what the culture looks like.”
The Heat haven’t won a championship since 2013. Butler guided the franchise to the NBA Finals in 2020 and 2023, but Miami lost both times.
Be the first to comment