(Pat) Riley likes the storm. Needs it. He is truly terrible at being satisfied. He doesn’t trust the calm. He wants the water rising and the kingdom on fire, and he’ll make it so even as everyone is floating and feeling safe, especially if everyone is floating and feeling safe.

“I’m past Thursday night,” he says. “It is over. We’ve got the draft coming up.”

So you aren’t like (Dwyane) Wade, who has printed up Team No Sleep T-shirts while careening between South Florida parties?

“I’m going to put out Sleep Management T-shirts,” Riley says. “We’ve got a championship in our back pocket. Just one. One of the things you don’t want to do after it is in your back pocket, you don’t want to start reminding everyone how you did it. That is the start of the team on the demise. I remember when we won in 1987, best year we ever had with the Lakers, Mychal Thompson was our Shane Battier. We won the championship, had a great night, celebrated, a really great night, and he was in the weight room at 7 a.m. the next morning. I remember that 25 years later. You don’t want to get too drunk with your success. You don’t want to waste a lot of time telling everyone how you mastered it. Simply, euphorically, quietly, enjoy it. That is hard for the contemporary generation today to understand.”

via Dan Le Batard of the Miami Herald