Riley admitting what we all knew at the time. He should have paid Wade.
“The biggest mistake that I made was not to just recommend that we sign Dwyane and Chris to max contracts as soon as LeBron left, and let’s build around them,”
Riley told Anthony Chiang of the Miami Herald. “What we wanted to do and what I wanted to do was not to use Dwyane, but to use the opportunity to pay him and at the same time bring in another superstar.
“We should have just bit the bullet. He was our franchise guy. We had just been to the Finals four years in a row. They had already played the give-back game, Chris, LeBron and Dwyane to keep Mike Miller and to keep Udonis Haslem. So this was the time now to pay both of them. And we paid Chris and we did not pay Dwyane. If we had done that, he would have been here. He would have never left. This would have been his last year [on the contract], his fifth year.”