Getty Pat Riley said that Anthony Davis (center) and the Lakers should have an asterisk because of an injury to Bam Adebayo (left).
Miami Heat president Pat Riley—the legendary former coach of the Lakers—credits the Lakers for their NBA Finals win over his team this month. But, he told reporters on Friday, L.A.’s championship should be affixed with a dreaded bit of punctuation: an asterisk.
That’s because of injuries that limited the Heat’s Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic.
“I would like to see what it would be like with everybody whole,” Riley said, according to the Miami Herald. “We’ll get our chance again. The Lakers have the greatest player in the game today in LeBron [James] and Anthony Davis.
“They beat us fair and squarely. But there will always be that asterisk; if we had Bam and Goran 100%— Goran was our leading scorer [entering the Finals]—it might have gone to a seventh game.”
Dragic went out in the first game of the series with a torn plantar fascia. He returned to play 19 mostly ineffective minutes in Game 6.
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Adebayo, meanwhile, injured his neck in Game 1 of the Finals and missed Games 2 and 3. He came back to average 17.7 points, 7.0 rebounds and 3.3 assists in the last three games of the series.
Miami Heat Lost 2 of 3 Best Players vs. Los Angeles Lakers
Riley is right in that Adebayo and Dragic were two of the Heat’s three best players in the postseason. Heading into the Finals, Adebayo averaged 18.5 points, 11.4 rebounds and 4.9 assists in the first three rounds of the playoffs. Even when he came back, he was not at the same level.
Dragic averaged 20.9 points, 4.7 assists and 4.2 rebounds before the Finals. He fought through tremendous pain to get back on the floor for the series finale, but the foot injury was too much. Unlike Riley, though, Dragic conceded that the Lakers were the better team.
“It’s been hell for me the last 10 days,” Dragic said after Game 6, “but I just want to be out there to help my team as much as possible and, no, it is what it is. The Lakers were better. We fought. Unfortunately, we didn’t have it today, but, yeah, have to move on.”
There Will Be No Asterisk for Lakers
The Lakers’ championship will be officially in the NBA history books, and it will be there with no asterisk attached even if the circumstances were unconventional. The league has never entertained the idea of putting an asterisk alongside this season.
Before the NBA even began its restart at the end of July, many questioned whether the remainder of the season should be considered legitimate. One reason commissioner Adam Silver wanted to have a full playoffs—all three rounds, seven games each, plus the Finals—was to ensure that the results of the season would be seen as unimpeachable.
One column from The Undefeated in June was headlined, “This NBA Finals Comes With a Horrible Asterisk.” NBC NBA insider Tom Haberstroh wrote that, ahead of the NBA restart, we should, “get ready for asterisk talk.” Yahoo! columnist Vince Goodwill wrote that the season would have an asterisk but that, “The asterisk will only be there to mark this time and place in history, not as a claim that the champion didn’t earn its honor.”
And there was Marc Berman of the New York Post.
But Riley is not claiming that the Lakers should have an asterisk because of the odd circumstances in the NBA bubble—he’s saying that the Heat’s injuries somehow make the Lakers’ title worthy of a footnote.
Injuries in the championship series are especially unfortunate, but they happen, and the team that benefits has never been asterisk-ed because of it. Just last year, Klay Thompson of the Warriors tore his ACL in Game 5 and Kevin Durant ruptured his Achilles tendon in Game 6, paving the way to a Raptors championship.
And you could go back in history and slap some asterisks on Riley’s own litany of championships—in 1988, for example, star Pistons point guard Isiah Thomas was injured after scoring 43 points in Game 6 and scored only 10 points in 28 minutes in Game 7.
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