CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Pat Riley now understands why LeBron James left him and the Miami Heat to return to the Cavaliers, though he resisted sounding like "Dan Gilbert" when James first left.
"He went home because he had to go home," Riley told ESPN's Wright Thompson for a magazine story. "It was time. It was really time for him to go home, in his prime. If he's ever gonna do anything in Akron again, this was the time to do it. Otherwise, he'd have had a scarlet letter on his back the rest of his whole life.