Miami Heat president Pat Riley regrets not giving Dwyane Wade a max contract in the summer of 2014 after LeBron James left South Beach to go back to the Cleveland Cavaliers.

After James left, Riley and the Heat gave Wade a two-year, $31.125 million deal. Wade left the Heat in the summer of 2016 and signed with his hometown Chicago Bulls.

Riley says had he given Wade a max contract in 2014, the Miami icon would have never left for the Bulls:

“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.”

Wade has never been the highest-paid player on the Heat at any point during his legendary career with the franchise.

The future Hall of Famer spent one season with the Bulls and a half-season with the Cavs before he was traded back to the Heat at the February trade deadline in 2018.