Editor’s note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering leadership, personal development and performance through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.
On the first day of training camp in 1995, Pat Riley introduced the Miami Heat to a conditioning drill that defined his coaching style.
It had a simple name: The Riley Test.
In theory, it wasn’t complicated. The players were to complete a series of “17s” — a famous sideline-to-sideline sprint — in an allotted time based on their position. In practice, it was brutal, the kind of gut-busting challenge that could strike terror in NBA veterans. Keith Askins, a 6-foot-7 forward who had been in the league for five seasons, admitted he had dreaded it for two weeks.
Riley had brought the test from New York, where he used it to transform the Knicks into one of the toughest teams in the league. He was steadfast in its purpose. He had played for Adolph Rupp at Kentucky, and had studied the NFL greats — Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry and Don Shula. They all put conditioning at the forefront.
“Championships are won by teams that endure,” Riley told reporters then. “They don’t win just because they’re good.”
Then came the first day of training camp, and 20 players stepped up to the line. Thirteen failed.
“Nobody threw up,” Rex Chapman told the Miami Herald. “That was a good sign.”
Across the last 30 years, the Riley Test became part of the bedrock of the culture. Some of the specific details have changed, but for the last three decades, if you played for the Miami Heat, you took a test. Eddy Curry feared it. LeBron James crushed it. But there was no escaping it.
“Yes, it’s a conditioning test,” said Dan Bisaccio, the Heat’s G League coach. “But it’s more of a mental test of grit and toughness.”
One day earlier this summer, in anticipation of NBA training camps starting this week, my editor reached out with an idea: Can you try to do the Riley Test? Maybe there’s something to be learned.
Uhhhh, I said. Sure.
It might be best to begin with the specifics. At least, the details as they were in 1995.
The foundation of the test was a “17,” an old conditioning drill in which players had to sprint the width of a basketball court 17 times. Put another way: It was eight down-and-backs from sideline to sideline, with an extra thrown in for maximum cruelty.
The math is no more forgiving. The width of an NBA court is 50 feet, which makes a “17” exactly 850 feet — or a little more than 259 meters — back and forth, back and forth.
The Heat guards were required to run five “17s” in a cumulative time of 5:05; the big men in 5:35. They got a two-minute break between each one.
In essence, it meant that Heat guards had to run each individual “17” in a minute. If they failed, they had to show up and try again the next day.
So one day in August, I jogged to a local park in Brooklyn. The dimensions were slightly smaller than an NBA court, so I measured 50 feet and marked the unofficial lines. Then I pulled up the stopwatch on my phone and hit start.
My legs were pushing. My heart was pumping. I had sprinted the width of the court seven times, and it was at this point that I recalled that 17 is a surprisingly large number. I remembered why my high school coaches in Kansas City would have us count our laps out loud, screaming each individual one.
One! … Two! … Three!
Some context: I play pickup basketball once a week. I jog — slowly — about 25 miles per week. But I had not done a formal “17” in 20 years. I finished the first one in 1:09. Then it got worse.
The second one: 1:17. Then 1:25, 1:29, 1:31. I was gassed. To uphold the rules of the test, I decided I would try again the next day.
I suppose there was no shame in it. On that first day in 1995, Chapman told reporters it was “probably the most difficult first day I’ve ever been a part of.” And he was one of the seven who passed.
Heat players tell war stories of wobbly knees. Of trash cans set up on the sidelines. But there was another side to it, too. The culture could be contagious. When Curry, a hulking 7-foot center, played for the Heat in 2011-12, he recalled seeing James destroy “17s” even when he wasn’t 100 percent.
If you wanted to feel sorry for yourself, it was hard when Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were out there, too. When you conquered the test, you only felt stronger.
“I even look back at pictures of myself,” Curry told former NBA player Stacey King in 2023, “and I’m like, geez, I need to go spend some time in Miami for a little bit.”
The “17” itself had its own lore. Jerry Tarkanian, the legendary college basketball coach, once claimed he invented it. Whether that was true or not, it became a staple of high school and college programs in the ’80s and ’90s.
Every school had its times and tests. When Roy Williams was an assistant at North Carolina, Dean Smith used an old-school staple: the mile run. If it felt passé, its purpose was not.
“That test has a lot of value in it,” Hubert Davis, a former UNC player and now the program’s head coach, said in 2018. “It’s conditioning, it’s heart, it’s toughness, it’s will, it’s want to. It’s something I did, my uncle (Walter Davis) did, Michael Jordan did, James Worthy did.”
For Riley, the calculus was simple: The test was an indicator. If you were a professional basketball player, you should blow it right off the court.
But what about a washed sportswriter in his late 30s?
The next day, I returned to the park. I didn’t feel stronger, but I did run faster. My first one was 1:07. It was a personal best. It felt like a plateau.
No. 2: 1:11No. 3: 1:17No. 4: 1:21No. 5: 1:23
I tried again a third day. My times were roughly the same. The same thing happened on days four and five. I had attempted the test for five straight days, and I had eclipsed 1:05 just once.
Relatively speaking, my body felt good. Then again, I wasn’t going through an NBA practice after the 17s; I just had to walk 10 blocks home.
The workout itself was strangely addicting: A “17” requires more than just pure speed. The short bursts and constant change of direction demands an element of quickness, a type of agility I lost long ago. Nor could I ever maintain my top speed on the fourth and fifth set.
But I started messing around with the technique. Instead of always hitting the line with my right foot and turning to my left, I started varying my turns. Mostly, I was amazed at how much conditioning I could do in just 15 minutes. After just three 17s, I was dripping in sweat.
Back in 1995, it had taken the Heat four days of training camp before everyone officially passed. The final two players were forward Billy Owens and center Alan Ogg. The public accountability taught Owens a lesson.
“I’ll make sure I’m practicing them for a month or two (next year),” he told reporters.
It was something my own tests lacked: There was nobody to push me. Yes, that was my excuse. Research has shown that people naturally run faster and work harder in groups. It’s a phenomenon known as the Kohler Effect, identified by the German psychologist Otto Köhler in the 1920s. The reason: Nobody wants to be the weakest link. There’s power in the collective, in getting through it together.
It’s perhaps the secret of the Riley Test and other drills like it.
When Riley set out to establish the Heat’s culture, he brought a mission statement. The Miami Heat were to be “the hardest working, best conditioned, most professional, unselfish, toughest, most admired team in the NBA.”
“Teams that have the ethic, when it comes around to a seven-game championship series, they have a great chance,” Riley said.
On the first day, the players always stood on the line with their teammates. If they didn’t beat the clock, they had to run again the next day. The way Riley saw it, his players had to figure out a way to endure.
For five days, I almost did.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE / Getty Images)
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