Mike Celizic

It was a nice start, a very nice start. But let’s not get carried away over one win by a team with a new coach, no matter how familiar that coach may be to championship basketball.

Pat Riley’s certainly not naïve enough to believe that the Heat’s 100-97 win over the Bulls in his first game back on the bench in just over two years means both he and his team are back on top of the heap. The Bulls are an improving team, but they’re still a .500 team. It’s not as if he beat the Spurs, or even his old Lakers.

Riley himself admitted that it’s going to take a while for him to get comfortable with the team and coaching after his self-imposed exile to the team presidency. For his sake, though, it had better be a short while.

It’s not that his job is in jeopardy. After all, he’s the person who would have to fire himself, and that’s not going to happen soon. No matter how much Stan Van Gundy talked during his exit interview about his need to get back to his family, it’s been assumed in Miami since before the season began that Riley wanted back behind the bench.

Some said Shaquille O’Neal helped grease the skids that hurried Van Gundy home, a suggestion that the big guy has denied as vigorously as Kobe Bryant denied forcing Shaq and Phil Jackson out of L.A.

If Shaq did want Riley calling the plays, you can’t blame him. If there’s one situation in which the coach thrives, it’s running a team with a dominant center. In L.A., it was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In New York, it was Patrick Ewing. In his first coaching incarnation in Miami, it was Alonzo Mourning.

Riley likes to run the game from the inside out, and with the Diesel in the middle and Dwyane Wade handling the ball, the Heat are built for that game. Against the Bulls, Shaq, who made his first start after missing 18 games with an ankle sprain, responded with 30 points, seven rebounds and three assists. Overall, the Heat had six players in double figures, another promising sign.

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But those are only signs. You had to figure the Heat would be inspired by the coaching change and Shaq would be ultra-motivated in just his second game back. It’s what happens when the excitement dies down and the competition gets stiffer that matters.

In the end, it doesn’t matter why Van Gundy left. What matters is that Riley thought he could do a better job than the man who took the Heat to the NBA Eastern Conference finals, a man who improved the team’s record by 17 games in each of his two seasons.

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And now the Heat, so to speak, is on the man with the greaser hairdo that he wears in proud homage to his roots as a tough kid from Schenectady.

And it’s going to take more than one win over the Bulls to prove that Riley can take the Heat to another title, a title that’s eluded him even since he left Showtime and L.A. to coach first the Knicks and then the Heat.

“It’s not about titles,” he told ESPN before the game. Instead, he said, it’s about leading great players to greatness. If they encounter a championship along the way, so much the better.

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