On Sunday, the Los Angeles Lakers are unveiling a statue of Pat Riley in a ceremony to honor the 80-year-old before hosting the Boston Celtics. He’s the eighth franchise figure immortalized in bronze, and the first honored primarily for coaching.
While many younger fans may associate Riley with the Miami Heat given his role as an executive and coach in South Beach, Riley is also a Lakers legend who played and coached in Los Angeles. Let’s look back on his playing days and coaching career with the Lakers.
Pat Riley’s Playing Career With the Lakers Laid the Foundation for Showtime
Riley’s connection to the organization started 56 years ago, when a scrappy guard from Schenectady, New York, arrived in Los Angeles and began learning what winning looked like from the inside.
The San Diego Rockets selected Riley with the No. 7 overall pick in the 1967 NBA draft after he starred at Kentucky, where he led the Wildcats to the 1966 NCAA championship game. He spent three seasons in San Diego before the Portland Trail Blazers claimed him in the 1970 expansion draft, then promptly traded him to Los Angeles.
Riley played five seasons with the Lakers as a reserve guard, averaging 7.4 points, 1.6 rebounds, and 1.7 assists per game over his nine-year career. He wasn’t a star. He was a role player backing up Jerry West on a roster loaded with Hall of Famers. His most productive season came in 1974-75, when he averaged 11.0 points in 22 minutes per game across 46 appearances.
BREAKING: Pat Riley statue unveiled —
This is awesome. 👏🔥
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— Hoop Central (@TheHoopCentral) February 22, 2026
The defining moment of his playing career came in 1971-72, when Riley contributed off the bench for a Lakers team that rattled off a still-unbroken 33 consecutive wins and captured the NBA championship. That squad, led by Wilt Chamberlain and West, went 69-13 in the regular season. Riley saw the habits, preparation, and relentlessness of greatness up close. He didn’t need to be the best player on that team to absorb what made it work.
After the Lakers traded him to Phoenix early in the 1975-76 season, Riley retired. He returned to the organization in 1977 as a broadcaster, calling games alongside Chick Hearn. Then, in 1979, Paul Westhead hired him as an assistant coach, and the Lakers won the 1980 championship. When the team needed a new head coach weeks into the 1981-82 season, West was the initial choice but declined and suggested Riley instead. The role player became the sideline icon.
No other figure on Star Plaza traveled that path. Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal were superstars. West and Elgin Baylor were franchise cornerstones. Hearn was the voice of the team. Riley is the only one who sat on the Lakers’ bench as a player, stood in the broadcast booth as an analyst, assisted from the coaching staff, and then ran the show himself. That progression gave him something none of the others had: perspective from every seat in the building.
The Lakers scheduled the ceremony before their matchup with Boston, and the choice was deliberate. Riley’s coaching tenure from 1981 to 1990 produced a 533-194 regular-season record, four NBA championships (1982, 1985, 1987, 1988), and seven Finals appearances. His teams never won fewer than 50 games in a season and hit 60-plus wins five times. Two of those titles came against the Celtics, but so did one of the most painful losses: a seven-game defeat in 1984.
“He kept us together with honesty and truth and hard work,” James Worthy told the Los Angeles Times. “There weren’t no days off. Wasn’t no load management. None of that. Every game I played with Pat Riley, win or lose, I was ready and prepared.”
Riley’s experience as a player shaped how he coached those teams. He understood locker-room dynamics because he’d been the guy at the end of the bench watching them unfold. He knew what role players needed to hear because he’d been one. His concept of the “Disease of More,” which he wrote about in his 1988 book “Showtime,” came from watching the Lakers stumble in 1980-81 after winning it all. He’d lived through the complacency of a championship team as a player in the early ’70s, too.
Erik Spoelstra, Riley’s current head coach in Miami, won’t attend the ceremony but said he’ll be watching. “It just shows you how much of a force of nature Pat has been and continues to be,” Spoelstra said. “The consistency and the success and the imprint he put on organizations, and left a major imprint on the Lakers even after he left.”
Riley left the Lakers after the 1989-90 season, coached the New York Knicks for four years, then built a second dynasty in Miami. He won his fifth championship as a head coach with the Heat in 2006, added two more titles as an executive in 2012 and 2013, and remains the team’s president at age 80. He is the first North American sports figure to win a championship as a player, assistant coach, head coach, and executive. The Heat named their court after him on opening night of the 2024-25 NBA season.
But the statue goes up in Los Angeles, where it all started with a bench player who paid attention. Riley’s nine championships across every role in basketball trace back to those five seasons in a Lakers uniform, watching winners work.
