Miami Heat president Pat Riley said this year’s Lakers title should come with an asterisk … but not the one you’re imagining.
See, the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals this year, in a season that was made totally strange by the outbreak of COVID-19 globally.
The season was at first put on hold, then resumed with only some teams in the “NBA Bubble” — an enclosed encampment of hotels and playing facilities at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Because of this strangeness, some people on this here internet have taken to saying that this year’s title should come with an “asterisk.”
Riley thinks there’s an asterisk here, but it has nothing to do with COVID-19 or the bizarre season.
It had to do with the Heat injuries in the NBA Finals, specifically those to Goran Dragic and Bam Adebayo.
Here’s the quote (emphasis mine):
“I would like to see what it would be like with everybody whole. We’ll get our chance again. The Lakers have the greatest player in the game today in LeBron [James] and Anthony Davis,” Riley said, via the Miami Herald.
“They beat us fair and squarely. But there will be always be that asterisk; if we had Bam and Goran 100 percent — Goran was our leading scorer [entering the Finals] — it might have gone to a seventh game.”
This makes Riley’s comments, while a bit sour grapes-y, a lot easier to understand. This is your garden variety “asterisk” talk — man, if we had only been healthy, this would have been a series.
Trying to say anything else would have been ludicrous.
