Kicked a door so hard that he had to undergo surgery — enough evidence that Pat Riley was one angry coach if his team ever underperformed. There have been well-documented instances of him yelling and even cussing the players for their shortcomings. But was there a player in Magic Johnson’s LA Lakers whom even Riley did not want to mess up with? At least, that’s what Byron Scott has claimed during his recent appearance on ‘All Facts No Brakes’ podcast.

Although he mentioned Pat Riley as one of the best coaches he ever saw, Scott stated Riley held players accountable for their fault. “I mean, he would cuss me out, Magic out, Coop (Michael Cooper) out. Cause he know our three guys, we were kind of the, you know, kept the ball rolling,” he recollected on the podcast. Explaining Riley’s reason, Scott said that the coach knew these three players could take it and come back stronger. However, the 3x NBA champ further narrated an incident that reflected The Godfather steered clear of Kareem Abdul Jabbar in this sense.

Scott recalled the incident where the then Lakers coach was cussing players out and he yelled at Kareem as well. “And cap turned around, looked up at him… And that stare (from Kareem). Riley said, ‘And such and such, you ain’t doing this and that’. I mean, he went away from captain,” Scott stated. The 3x NBA champ later asked the 7 ‘2” player what all it was about. “Man, I played with Riles. He better leave me alone. He know I’ll knock him,” Scott recalled what The Big ‘A’ told him. 

However, it does not seem this scenario ever affected the player-coach relationship between the two. In fact, Riley has stated Kareem as “the greatest player of all time because of his longevity”. It seems all that anger was just something that kept Riley functioning to his best as a coach. 

The time when Pat Riley’s anger at Miami Heat costed him a surgery   

Miami Heat hired Riley as the head coach in 1995 and by the time he already had 4 NBA championships in his name as a coach. With Riley taking the command, he led the team to 6 consecutive playoffs. However, he failed to get a championship for the franchise in his first stint. But The Godfather achieved this when the Heat hired him as the head coach for the second time in 2005.

But he was not someone who would let his team underperform just because he already had 5 NBA championships. During the 2006-07 season, Heat was the defending champion, but the team was having a rough season. Recollecting on the same lines, Udonis Haslem once narrated the incident where, in a game, Riley came to the team all furious and started cussing the players. 

“He got mad, he cussed us out. He kicked the door. And we didn’t see his a** for two weeks. And the next thing we found out, he had hip surgery… He had surgery because he blew his hip out, kicking the door,” Haslem said as per a 2020 article by Heat Nation. Subsequently, the team put up a terrible record of 15-67. What came next was Riley replacing himself as head coach with Erik Spoelstra.