Pat Riley on state of Heat during NBA shutdown. And Meyers Leonard shows off new Vice look
With the NBA season still on hold amid the coronavirus pandemic, Miami Heat president Pat Riley believes the science will dictate whether the 2019-20 campaign will be saved.
“We’re waiting for probably the most challenging decision that Adam Silver and his staff, not only in our sport but in every other sport [has made],” Riley said in a video posted Friday to the Heat’s various social media platforms, representing his first public comments since the NBA season was suspended on March 11. “He is being very, very cautious. I think that’s great and he’s going to rely on science. I think we have to rely on science because this will be an unprecedented move when he decides to start this thing back up.”
During a conference call with reporters last week, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league is “not ready to set a date of how long we can wait before we can no longer continue the season. Everything is on the table, including potentially delaying the start of next season. We are not in position to make any decisions [about the status of this season] and it’s unclear when we will be. We still don’t have enough information to make a decision.”
Silver said earlier this month that a decision on the remainder of the NBA season will not come until May at the earliest, as team facilities across the league have remained closed since March 20.
As the Heat and the rest of the NBA awaits word on what comes next, Riley credited the Heat’s coaching staff, strength and conditioning coaches and training staff for keeping players engaged throughout quarantine.
“We got together with our players for two, three straight days ... and then we got the news that we had to shut down all the facilities and everything,” Riley said in Friday’s video. “From that point on, we simply started to develop a strategy to stay connected with our players, to engage our players, to send out memos to them.
“I think coach [Erik Spoelstra] Spo and [head strength and conditioning coach] Eric Foran and the whole staff, downstairs [head athletic trainer] Jay Sabol and his group have done an incredible job of conditioning our players with the Zoom videos four or five days a week, sending out letters, sending out motivational statements, Jay Sabol checking in every single night with our guys to see if they’re OK. We’ve been monitoring that as we can.”
▪ Asked by longtime Heat play-by-play broadcaster Eric Reid about helping lead the franchise to its first NBA championship in 2006, Riley got emotional in a video released by the team on Saturday morning. That 2006 title was Riley’s first NBA championship as a head coach since winning one with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1987-88.
“It was just a wonderful feeling. It had been so long, almost 20 years since I won a championship,” an emotional Riley said in the video. “The thing that made it so great for me is my kids got to see it. I can remember my kids watching us lose in New York and they didn’t understand the misery of losing. To have them see that, those were good moments. I could see my daughter come down out of the stands, jump over the rope. They knew that their dad could win the title.”
Meyers Leonard’s new Vice look
Heat center Meyers Leonard had a goal of raising $175,000 in April through gaming and other platforms with hopes of feeding more than $1 million people in the middle of the coronavirus crisis.
Leonard said if he reached that goal, he would dye his hair. Well, the 28-year-old announced Friday he surpassed his goal and dyed his hair Vice pink and blue.
Leonard tweeted: “We officially raised over $125,000 for COVID-19 relief and have recently surpassed $175,000 (my goal, just not updated yet) in route to feed over 1 million people in the month of April due to Coronavirus. Thank you to everyone who has supported in some way.”
This story was originally published April 25, 2020 at 11:29 AM.