Spoelstra among top coaches all-time in playoff victories
Erik Spoelstra is just two wins from taking the Miami Heat to the NBA Finals for the fifth time. Players say he doesn’t get enough credit for their success, but that doesn’t matter to him.
To get Erik Spoelstra to talk about himself is almost as hard as defeating the Miami Heat these days.
Spoelstra will not entertain questions about his coaching ability, always pushing the attention back on his players and the action on the basketball court.
Spoelstra definitely won’t discuss his place among the NBA’s elite head coaches. And good luck trying to get Spoelstra to talk about the tangible impact he has had on the Heat’s success this postseason.
But with the fifth-seeded Heat holding a 2-0 series lead over the Celtics entering Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals on Saturday night, it’s impossible to ignore Spoelstra’s work with a roster that features just one player who was a top-10 draft pick. Miami’s 10-1 start this postseason matches 2005 for the best playoff start in franchise history.
“He doesn’t get enough credit,” said retired Heat star Dwyane Wade, who played 10 of his 16 NBA seasons with Spoelstra as his head coach. “But you guys know, Spo don’t care about the credit. He doesn’t care at all. But I mean, you look around the league. I know he’s in Miami and he has been kind of raised through it.”
But if he was losing and he wasn’t a good coach, he wouldn’t still be there. We know Pat Riley. We know Pat Riley is cutthroat. He would not still be there. So to be able to give him that grace period to kind of learn as a young coach, it was definitely beneficial. But he has taken that and he has run with it.”
Spoelstra, 49, has done that and more, as he has become the winningest coach in franchise history while helping lead the Heat to the playoffs in nine of his 12 seasons as head coach. He’s also just two wins from his fifth NBA Finals appearance and six wins from his third championship as the Heat’s head coach, with the first four Finals appearances and two titles coming during the Big 3 era.
Thursday’s Game 2 win moved Spoelstra into a tie with K.C. Jones for the eighth-most playoff victories (81) by a head coach in NBA history. Spoelstra’s postseason winning percentage (.628) is higher than every coach ahead of him on that list except for Phil Jackson (.688).
“He will not get enough credit for the Big 3 era because people think if you put talent together, you’re just going to win,” Wade said. “That is not true. We had an unbelievable general to lead us to those championships and the success we had, and he’s continuing it. He has shown with multiple teams, with Dion Waiters and James Johnson, that team came and they showed what they could do in that second half of the [2016-17] season.
“He has shown with multiple teams how great of a coach he is. ... He’s a great coach, man. He won’t get the respect from the outside. But from all of us who really know, he got it.”
There have been many smart adjustments Spoelstra has made through the years, and his ability to tailor schemes around his personnel is elite.
Both those things came into play in Thursday’s Game 2 win, when Spoelstra turned to the Heat’s zone defense in the second half to lead the comeback. Trailing by 13 points at halftime, Miami outscored Boston 37-17 in the third quarter behind its 2-3 zone look to turn a 13-point halftime deficit into a seven-point lead entering the fourth quarter.
The Celtics scored just 25 points and committed five turnovers on 32 possessions against the Heat’s zone defense in Game 2, according to Couper Moorhead from Heat.com. That’s 0.78 points per possession.
For context: The NBA’s top defense, the Milwaukee Bucks, allowed 1.03 points per possession in the regular season.
“It was a good adjustment for us,” Heat rookie Tyler Herro said. “We just wanted to throw a different look at them. They were carving us up when we were playing man-to-man. Coach made an adjustment at half and we went with it.”
Including the regular season and playoffs, Boston is averaging 1.15 points per possession against Miami’s man defense and just 0.94 points per possession against Miami’s zone defense, according to ESPN’s Kirk Goldsberry.
“I think Spo did an amazing job to change the coverage,” Heat guard Goran Dragic said. “Spo likes to do that. He switches on the fly on the sideline and goes man-to-man or zone or blitzes the pickand-roll.”
What exactly sets Spoelstra apart from other coaches? Every player has a different answer, but they all agree that he’s different than others they have played for during their basketball careers.
“I think the thing that fascinates me is how he can put all of these different pieces together and make the team function,” Dragic said. “One of the best qualities that he has is he’s up front with you.
He’s going to tell you,
‘Hey, this is your role. You’re going to do this, this and this.’ Basically there’s no confusion with the players. You know what your role is on the team. When you’re setting those roles on the team like that, then you can play free. He’s really an underrated coach. One of the best coaches in this league. People should give him more credit for that.”
As one associate of a Heat player said, “Erik is so detailed and right to the heart. He doesn’t back down from any conversation big or small, and deals with everything immediately. He’s tough and unrelenting.”
Heat All-Star wing and leading man Jimmy Butler said of Spoelstra: “He trusts his players, everybody — and as much as he’s commanding us on what to do, he’s always asking, ‘What do you see?’ Whenever you have a coach like that, he knows that we may see the game differently than he may see the game. It helps.
“He puts a lot of trust in us to go out and play basketball the way we should play it. It works. He makes everybody feel comfortable, and hell, I’m glad he’s my coach.”
When asked about Spoelstra, All-Star center Bam Adebayo pointed to his own story in his first three seasons with the Heat.
“He wants people to improve. I feel like that’s the biggest thing about Spo,” Adebayo said. “He wants his players to develop. He doesn’t want them to just develop in like one thing. He wants you to expand your game. Having a coach like that that wants his players to be unique and wants them to be what they want to be or what they think they can be, and just morphing them into being that. That’s a big thing for me.
“Once you figure our your role and you start to really be that role and really embrace that that’s your role, your role starts to expand. You can kind of put me in that example. My rookie year, I wasn’t what I am now. I was playing defense and catching lobs. That was it. As the season went on, I started to get more minutes and then it went from just being in a drop zone to switching and catching lobs to making plays in the pocket. Then you started to see the advancement in my game. The ball started being in my hands more. I started becoming a threat on offense.”
In other words, Adebayo said Spoelstra is “open to guys expanding their games.”
This season will be considered by many as Spoelstra’s crowning achievement, especially if the Heat finishes off the Celtics and advances to the NBA Finals. The last time a team seeded fifth or lower made it to the NBA Finals came in 1999, when the eighthseeded New York Knicks represented the East in the championship series.
But Spoelstra has no interest in discussing any of that, and that’s just another trait that sets him apart.
“I know everybody wants to talk about a scheme but for us it’s disposition, effort, making multiple plays and multiple efforts,” Spoelstra said, “regardless of the scheme.”