"You've got to go out with him" - Pat Riley reveals how he taught his players to never back down from NBA legends

Pat Riley may look suave and sophisticated in his expensive suits and slicked-back hair, but make no mistake: he’s as tough as nails and wants every player on his team to play like it. That showed in how the New York Knicks and the Miami Heat played under Riley.

Tough, aggressive, and completely unhesitant to dish out pain to anyone who dared enter his shaded lane, Riley made that clear to his players from the get-go.

Riley wasn’t just exceptional with Xs and Os; he was also a master motivator who often used unconventional methods to send a message to his players. He recalled one time when he brought a 2×4 piece of wood into the locker room.

“I can remember, and this came from Jimmy Johnson. You know, I remember I brought a two-by-four-by-12 into the locker room. And so I brought the two-by-four in the locker room and I placed it down. All the guys were ready because we had a rule: you had to be taped, ready, dressed and everything, ready, and then you got to rush out of there onto the court,” Riles shared.

“And so they all looked at the two-by-four, and I got on the two-by-four and I walked across it without falling off it. Balanced myself, walked right across it. And I said, ‘Well, somebody else can come up and walk,'” he continued. “And a couple guys came up and walked across it, and they laughed, ‘I could do it too.'”

However, Riley gave everyone a unique perspective when he challenged them to do the same thing but with the piece of wood propped 200 feet in the air in between two buildings. Would the players make that walk?

“Changes the whole thing. It’s called fear. I’m not doing that, you know?” Riley stressed. “Here, it’s easy. But up here is where you have to play.”

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Riley’s message was simple: if his players wanted to beat the best, then they have to rise to the occasion and meet the best up top.

“My whole theory about that is that you can play on the floor, but if you want to beat Dwyane, or you want to beat Michael, or you want to beat Kobe, or you want to beat any of these guys, you got to meet him at the rim,” he said.

“You got to get up there at the rim and meet him there. Otherwise, they’re going to dunk on you and embarrass you.”

Another message Riley gave his players was never to give up any easy baskets. If they were going to go up and defend the rim against the game’s greats, they also had to be willing to bring them down to earth.

“But also a subtle message was sent about, you meet somebody at the rim, what happens? It’s a collision, man,” Riley remarked. “And I had one rule. I said, I said, ‘If you meet him at the rim and you take somebody out, you got to go out with them.’ You don’t want to hurt anybody, but you got to meet him at the rim.”

“Michael, you got to meet him at the rim or it’s over.”

Don’t let the looks fool you. Riley was a cutthroat competitor who told his players to get down and dirty to win.

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