Pat Riley, the team president of the Miami Heat, is one of the true greats of basketball. He has won championships at seemingly every level — as a player, assistant coach and head coach with the Los Angeles Lakers, and in the modern era, as a head coach and executive with the Heat.
He is known as someone who preaches discipline, attention to detail, sacrifice and accountability, and in doing so, he has established a Heat team culture that rivals that of any other NBA team.
During his recent appearance on "The Pat McAfee Show," LeBron James told a story from his days with Miami that seemed to illustrate Riley's ethos.
"Everyone knows I [expletive] love chocolate chip cookies," James said. "It's like my biggest vice.
"The plane we were getting on, the ladies on the plane were making chocolate chip cookies. So they were making them and bringing them because we had the same ladies all the time. ... And then one flight, I got on, I looked at them and they looked at me and I'm like, 'That look didn't look familiar.' And I asked them, 'We got them?' She was like, 'No. We're not allowed to. No more cookies on these flights.'
"And we all knew where it came from. I looked at D Wade (Dwyane Wade), D Wade looked at me, he was like, without even saying it, he was like, '[expletive] Riles done it again. Riles strikes again.'"
Even if James didn't get to have his favorite treat anymore, his years with the Heat were the most formative of his career. After seven fruitless seasons and a couple of bad playoff collapses with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he reached the NBA Finals in each of his four seasons with the Heat and won back-to-back NBA championships.
It's almost as if he arrived in Miami as a kid and left as a fully formed man, thanks in part to the mentorship of Riley.
This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: LeBron James tells a story of Pat Riley banning his favorite treat
