In making his pitch to free agent forward LaMarcus Aldridge, Heat president Pat Riley may have inadvertently driven Aldridge to the San Antonio Spurs.
Yahoo Sports’s Adrian Wojnarowski profiled Aldridge’s free agency, including looks inside all of his meetings with potential suitors. It turns out his meeting with Miami helped him make up his mind to go to San Antonio.
Wojnarowski writes that Aldridge was already very interested in the Spurs, and was impressed with the family atmosphere they gave off during their meeting. However, when Riley requested a meeting, he wanted to hear what he had to say. Riley wanted Aldridge to re-sign with Portland for a season and then join a new-look Miami team in 2016. His pitch, as it turns out, impacted Aldridge greatly.
“He told me, ‘You’re a good player, but you can be great,'” Aldridge told Yahoo. “I’ve had good seasons on my own, but to win, you’ve got to have other big-time guys with you. When you have other guys who are willing to take that sacrifice with you – maybe you all go from averaging 23-24 points to 18-19 points – and you can all do it together.
“He was saying, ‘Hey, you might have to take a lesser role, but at the end of the day, you want to be known as a champion. Champions have to do different things.’ He brought up Chris Bosh, how he was averaging 21 in Toronto, and came to Miami, and people tried to say he wasn’t important. He told me, ‘We don’t win any of those championships rings without him,’ [and] that [Bosh] wouldn’t trade those rings for anything.
“Eventually, it becomes a road in your career, whether you have to decide whether you want to keep having these crazy stats, or do you want to win a championship?”
On the night of July 2, with Popovich returning for a lunch meeting the next day, Riley had delivered an unintended assist to the Spurs. He had turned Aldridge’s mind back toward San Antonio, setting the stage for Popovich to close the deal. “Yeah, the things [Riley] said were definitely more positive for me coming to San Antonio,” Aldridge told Yahoo.
Riley essentially gave the Spurs’ sales pitch for them. They have great players who put egos aside to become even greater than the sum of their parts. They gave Aldridge a chance to win a lot now. Perhaps if San Antonio takes home an NBA title in 2016, they should send Riley a thank you note.
