Jimmy Butler's departure had caught Link by surprise, yet it also made perfect sense.
A three-peat was indeed an achievement many players dreamed of. Forget three straight championships—even winning a single title often required an entire career's worth of effort.
And even then, there was no guarantee they would get one.
But a team that achieved a three-peat would not necessarily remain unchanged. After all, everyone had their own pursuits and goals. Not everyone wanted to keep doing the same thing on the same team forever.
Especially after winning three consecutive championships, people's mindsets would change.
Forget a three-peat—even after winning just one championship, it was hardly unusual for a title-winning roster to fall apart.
The 2011 Dallas Mavericks, the Lakers after their previous three-peat, and so on were all living examples.
No team could dominate forever, and the enormous mobility of players was one of the NBA's greatest charms.
The NBA's famed coach and current Heat general manager Pat Riley had long studied and summarized this phenomenon. He vividly called this mentality "more disease."
Pat Riley was not merely a renowned head coach; that alone was not enough to encompass his greatness. Riley's understanding of basketball and the NBA was exceptionally thorough.
He was one of the few people to win championships in this league as a player, coach, and general manager. That was not simply because Riley was lucky.
He could lead a team to a championship as a coach, and he could also engineer an earth-shaking move like the Heat's Big Three as a general manager.
He had plenty of ideas about basketball. He had once predicted that the boundaries between positions would become increasingly blurred, and that basketball would eventually be played by five players around 2.05 meters tall.
And now, that trend was gradually becoming