Riley Will Suit Up on Sideline Again

Pat Riley is back on the sideline.

Six months after the Miami Heat’s president said he would “take a little bit more of an active participation,” it became a lot more of an active participation when he replaced Coach Stan Van Gundy, who resigned Monday.

Sounding like a man who knows he has a big job in front of him, Riley called the team “a mess.”

“I think the team has a chance for greatness,” he said at a news conference in Miami. “I really do. I don’t want to make any excuses. We’ve never been about that around here. I do believe that this team’s going to have to make a decision on whether or not they want to be part of greatness.”

Riley coached the Showtime Lakers to four of their five titles in the 1980s, when he became the matinee idol of coaches. Of course, there’s a price for greatness.

“If the guys aren’t mentally tough, they’re in for a rude awakening,” Magic Johnson, who played for Riley, said of the Heat players.

“Oh, man, they all should have hoped that Van Gundy stayed. That’s for real. It’s a new day, starting tomorrow at practice. Trust me....

“Some people are going to have to grow some tough skin they never had to grow before. Pat is a direct guy. That’s going to really be different than everybody’s used to. He’s going to say it in a way that they’re not used to a coach saying it, and right in their face. He doesn’t mind singling out anyone, from Shaq on down.”

Riley said that Van Gundy asked to step down six weeks ago but was talked into staying. For his part, Van Gundy insisted he was resigning to spend more time with his family.

Riley may well have been willing to give his former assistant more time. Nevertheless, speculation that Van Gundy was in trouble began in June, when Riley voiced his intention to help Van Gundy.

Riley then withdrew, seemingly intent on giving Van Gundy a chance to show he could make it work. However, Shaquille O’Neal was hurt in the second game, the team that was expected to dominate the East started 11-10 and Van Gundy resigned the day after Shaq got back.

“I made this decision for one reason and one reason only: I love my family,” Van Gundy said, noting he would have been home with his children for only 49 days during the season.

“That’s just not enough anymore for me. It’s just not enough. I mean, it’s been like that for my kids’ entire lives. I’ve got a 14-year-old daughter and it started to hit me when I started thinking about her birthday, which was last month. I’ve got four more years left with her. Four. And then she’ll be off to college and I’m just not willing to sacrifice any more of those four more years.”

At the heart of speculation about Riley’s return was O’Neal, who has made his opinion on his coaches known at every stop in his career. With the Lakers, he was thought to have been the driving force behind the decision of Jerry Buss, who tended to promote from within and had never paid a coach $2 million, to hire Phil Jackson in 1999 for $30 million over five seasons.

O’Neal said he went to Miami for Riley but soon began signaling his dissatisfaction with the hard-driving Van Gundy. Last winter, O’Neal, who takes a cavalier approach to the regular season, said, “Truthfully speaking, [finishing] anywhere in the first four spots would be good.”

Replied Van Gundy, “I’m just not on the same page with him on that stuff. I’m just not.”

Criticism of Van Gundy peaked last spring when he kept going to an injured Dwyane Wade while the Detroit Pistons outscored the Heat, 16-2, at the end of Game 7 in Miami and won the East finals.

O’Neal, limited to 20.6 points a game in the series and playing on a bruised thigh, was asked afterward if he was upset at not getting the ball.

“I’m not making the decisions,” O’Neal said. “You have to talk to the guy who’s making the calls out there.”

Not long afterward, Riley, asked a routine question about returning to coaching, said he would “never rule it out” and would “take a little bit more of an active participation” with the team.

When that produced a hail of reports speculating that he would replace Van Gundy, Riley tried to pull back. Asked about his remarks, Riley declined to comment, claiming it was “a loaded question.”

No one was even willing to say who would coach the team until mid-July when Riley and Van Gundy met for almost four hours. In the meantime, Van Gundy’s younger brother, Jeff, the Houston Rocket coach who was the original Riley protege as an assistant on his staff in New York, criticized his old mentor for dragging it out.

“I think Stan has earned the right, being there 10 years, just to get an answer,” Jeff said.

Stan returned this fall with a reconfigured roster, brimming over with personalities -- Antoine Walker, Jason Williams and Gary Payton. Signaling his concerns in camp, Van Gundy complained that there was “nobody willing to make the simple play.”

As an indication that Van Gundy’s authority was waning and the players knew it, even newcomer Payton aired his differences in philosophy.

Said Payton, after his third game with the Heat: “If I was the coach, I would do it a different way.... Stan is a coach that he wants to get everybody involved. That’s what he wants to do. So we’ve got to work with it. And that’s what we’re doing.”

Little was accomplished, though, in the next six weeks. Now it’s a new era. For Van Gundy, if not Riley or O’Neal, perhaps it was just in the nick of time.

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Times staff writer Mike Bresnahan contributed to this report.