Nineteen and counting: A look at Pat Riley's 19 appearances in the NBA Finals

DENVER – Some NBA players and coaches strive their whole lives to make it to the NBA Finals even once.

A select few, however, seem to make a life of it.

With the Miami Heat’s unexpected trek from the Play-In Tournament all the way to the league’s championship round, team president Pat Riley will be participating in the Finals for the 19th time as a player, coach or executive. That ties him with legendary Boston Celtics coach and GM Red Auerbach, but still significantly behind all-time leader Jerry West. The Hall of Fame Lakers guard has been involved in the Finals 30 times during his run as an All-Star, coach, GM and consultant, first with his original franchise and more recently with Golden State.

Riley arrived to the NBA as the seventh overall pick in 1967, a 6-foot-4 guard-forward out of Kentucky. That means the native of Schenectady, N.Y., has had a role in 34% of the 56 Finals played since his rookie season.

Here is a look at each of Riley’s 19 Finals:

1972, Lakers guard: Riley played nine seasons for the pre-Houston Rockets, the L.A. Lakers and the Phoenix Suns. He had bigger individual seasons, but that 1971-72 Lakers bunch ranks among the greatest NBA teams ever. They went 69-13 and reeled off 33 consecutive victories for a record that still stands. Led by West, Wilt Chamberlain and Gail Goodrich, the Lakers beat the Knicks in five games. Riley, 27, averaged 5.0 points in 16 minutes.

1973, Lakers guard: Riley and the rest went back to defend their title, only this time they lost to New York in five games. The future coach mostly stayed on Bill Sharman’s bench this time, logging only one minute in the series.

1976, Suns guard: Two games into the 1975-76 season, Riley was traded to Phoenix for guard John Roche and a second-round pick. The Suns used Riley in a similar backup role. The good news was that, while the Lakers missed the postseason for the second consecutive year, Phoenix made it for only the second time since entering the league in 1968. The bad news? Riley again only played one minute in one Finals game – and no, it wasn’t in the historic triple-overtime clash with the Celtics in Game 5.

1980, Lakers assistant coach: Riley retired as a player in 1976. For two seasons, from 1977-79, he served as broadcast sidekick to fabled Lakers play-by-play man Chick Hearn. But in November 1979, new coach Jack McKinney was badly hurt in a biking accident. His assistant, Paul Westhead, slid over to McKinney’s spot and got Riley to move into the assistant job. Not exactly rough duty: With rookie Magic Johnson reinvigorating veteran center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Lakers went 60-22 and beat Philadelphia for Riley’s second ring.

1982, Lakers coach: L.A. was upset in the first round in 1981 and early in 1981-82, Johnson – who had seen his rival Larry Bird lead Boston to the 1980-81 championship – got frustrated with Westhead’s coaching style. After a locker-room verbal altercation in Utah, Johnson told reporters he wanted to be traded. Within 24 hours, Westhead was fired and Riley was promoted. Leaning on his extraordinary point guard, Riley got the Lakers to win 50 of their final 71 games. Then they tore through the postseason with a 12-2 mark, ousting Phoenix, San Antonio and Philadelphia on their way to the title.

1983, Lakers coach: The “Showtime” Lakers were just as good this season, winning 58 games and bumping off the Blazers and the Spurs. Only this time, Riley and his team were swept by the Sixers, who had added MVP big man Moses Malone to counter Abdul-Jabbar.

1984, Lakers coach: Despite Abdul-Jabbar breaking Wilt Chamberlain’s all-time scoring mark, the high point of the season came seven weeks later. That’s when Johnson and Bird, college nemeses, met for the first time in the Finals. Boston won the memorable series in seven games, continuing its mastery of the Lakers dating back to the Bill Russell dynasty. Stung after squandering a 2-1 series lead, Riley prohibited his players from working out or otherwise fraternizing with hated foes in the offseason.

1985, Lakers coach: Riley picked up the second of his four rings as Lakers head coach when they took revenge on the Celtics in six games. After suffering through the “Memorial Day Massacre” loss in the opener at Boston Garden, L.A. won four of the next five rather easily, leaning on 38-year-old Abdul-Jabbar. The Captain averaged 25.7 points, 9.0 rebounds and 5.2 assists to earn his second Finals MVP trophy.

1987, Lakers coach: The third and last meeting with Boston in the Finals of the Magic-Bird era also went the Lakers’ way. Riley’s club won 65 games, owned the top offensive and net ratings in the NBA and ripped through Denver, Golden State and Seattle with an 11-1 mark in the playoffs. That left the Celtics, whom the Lakers edged 107-106 in pivotal Game 4 thanks to Johnson’s “junior, junior skyhook” over Kevin McHale and Robert Parish.

1988, Lakers coach: After the ’87 title parade, Riley went on the record guaranteeing a repeat championship for the group 12 months later. At the time, nobody had won two in a row since the Celtics in 1968 and ’69. The bold talk shocked some Lakers players but it also set the bar high for them and, sure enough, they beat Detroit in seven games.

1989, Lakers coach: The Pistons were back, this time spoiling any notion Riley might have had of a three-peat. The outcome was all but sealed in the third quarter of Game 2 when Johnson pulled his left hamstring, the injury rendering him and the Lakers’ attack ineffective from there. Detroit’s “Bad Boys” would win again in 1990 but not against the Lakers, who lost to Phoenix in the West semifinals in May and then lost Riley a month later.

1994, Knicks coach: After spending the 1990-91 season as co-host of the “NBA Showtime” studio show on NBC, Riley was hired by New York in May 1991. He underwent a stylistic change – out with “Showtime,” in with a bruising, sometimes brawling defense-first Knicks team. Riley was there four years, averaging 55 victories, with the high point coming against Houston in the 1994 Finals. With nemesis Michael Jordan off chasing curveballs in his first “retirement,” the Knicks and the Rockets went seven games before Houston prevailed.

2006, Heat coach: In the summer of 1995, Miami owner Micky Arison sent a first-round draft pick and $1 million to New York for the rights to sign Riley. It was money and a pick especially well spent. Riley overhauled the roster and changed the culture, with the Heat winning 64% of their games over the next six seasons. He stepped down as coach in 2003, drafting Wade that summer to begin a new era. But Riley came back 21 games into 2005-06, taking over for chosen successor Stan Van Gundy and leading the Heat all the way to the Finals against favored Dallas. The Mavs won the first two but Miami, heeding Riley’s “15 strong” mantra, swept the next four. The 18-year gap between the coach’s last championship in L.A. and this one remains an NBA record.

2011, Heat executive: Riley’s coaching days were behind him but his winning ways were not. From atop the Miami hierarchy, he picked Erik Spoelstra as the new coach, then got busy for the pivotal free agency season of 2010. Dazzling LeBron James by letting him ogle Riley’s seven championship rings at that point, he recruited the Cleveland star and Toronto’s Chris Bosh to team with Wade for four seasons of dominance.

2012, Heat executive: The Heat took their lumps in their first super-team season, losing the 2011 Finals to a workmanlike Dallas team built around star Dirk Nowitzki. But they coalesced around Spoelstra and gelled with Wade taking a half-step back to focus the offense on James. That got Miami back to the Finals and, this time, a ring in five games over Oklahoma City.

2013, Heat executive: Riley continued tweaking the roster, signing veteran marksman Ray Allen away from rival Boston. No surprise, then, when Allen’s 3-pointer from the right corner late in Game 6 forced overtime against San Antonio, arguably the most famous shot in NBA history sparking the OT victory and another championship two nights later.

2014, Heat executive: Allen’s shot didn’t just save the ’13 Finals for Miami. It drove the Spurs to push harder than ever toward payback, which they got when they faced Miami again a year later. San Antonio’s passing game was a thing of beauty as it bedazzled the Heat in five games.

2020, Heat executive: This was a weird one, more onion ring than championship ring due to all the Covid restrictions that moved the entire playoffs to Orlando and shifted the postseason into football season. The Heat were forced to play despite injuries to Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic, which prompted Riley to antagonize some Lakers folks by suggesting L.A.’s title needed “an asterisk.”

2023, Heat executive: Presiding over a coach (Spoelstra) at the peak of his powers, a closer who succeeds mostly on sheer force of will (Jimmy Butler) and a roster with multiple undrafted contributors, Riley is back on the Finals scene for the 19th time. His next ring will be his 10th.

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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.

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