Pat Riley has managed to work with some of the best players of their generations during his stops with the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks and Miami Heat.

Riley is fully aware that superstar players are necessary to compete for NBA titles.

He called these "very coherent thoughts and decisions that you make about getting stars. You've got to get great players. I've been around it my whole life." 

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to be able to see what it takes," Riley said, running through his experience playing with West and Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain, coaching against Larry Bird and Kevin McHale and Robert Parish, and so on. "If you can get three of those kinds of players and fill it out with some other good guys, then you might be ahead of the curve....So there are a lot of ways to skin a cat.

"For me, it's not through the draft, because lottery picks are living a life of misery. That season is miserable. And if you do three or four years in a row to get lottery picks, then I'm in an insane asylum. And the fans will be, too. So who wants to do that?"