Stability the key for Spoelstra
Miami avoids the coaching chaos of other teams
MIAMI
– Sunday was the day when Erik Spoelstra was going to visit with a close friend and fellow NBA head coach. Now it is nothing more than a prelude to Monday night’s game against the Memphis Grizzlies, because David Fizdale won’t be on the opposite bench at FedExForum.
Open season on NBA coaches arrived early — but also later that expected — when the Phoenix Suns fired Earl Watson on Oct. 22. Then, on Nov. 27, the Grizzlies dismissed Fizdale. Until those moves, the league had gone more than a season without a coach being replaced.
Patience had endured . until it wore thin.
“I think you saw a lot of organizations really committing to the long game last year, and understanding that it’s extremely competitive, it’s very difficult to win in this league, and it’s even harder to sustain,” Spoelstra said.
“But if you look around the league, the teams that have had the most stability are the ones that win more consistently.”
The dismissal of Fizdale particularly hit home. It was Spoelstra who rented out work space at a Miami hotel in the wake of the Heat’s crushing Game 7 playoff elimination against the Toronto Raptors in the 2016 Eastern Conference semifinals to help his lead assistant prepare for his Grizzlies coaching interview.
“Nick Arison mentioned to me, since ’95, Memphis had 13 head coaches — we’ve had three,” Spoelstra said of his conversation with the Heat’s chief executive officer, whose father, Micky Arison took over stewardship of the franchise in 1995. “So none of us should be surprised that they did that, unfortunately. They’ve had no stability for all those years.
“So, I don’t know. I hope last year’s trend continues, that organizations will understand the long game and the patient-process game, in a results-based league, a little bit more.”
The other end of the spectrum was what Spoelstra faced on Wednesday night, Gregg Popovich as coach of the San Antonio Spurs since 1996. Spoelstra is the NBA’s second-longest in terms of coaching tenure, in his 10th season.
“In this league, it’s pretty volatile,” Popovich said when asked about Spoelstra and this season’s two coaching dismissals. “If you don’t do a good job or somebody thinks you didn’t do a good job, you’re gone. And, obviously, he’s still there. People think he’s doing a good job because he is doing a good job. And that’s not going to happen across the board — just because you’ve got that synergy that’s called people and relationships. You’ve got owners. You’ve got managers. You’ve got coaches. And you’ve got players.
“And to get that right, to have enough people who have gotten over themselves to not be blamers, but be people who work through to solutions, is not going to be the standard, probably, in professional sports. That’s tough to do. So people like Erik Spoelstra are special because they’ve done a good job, but they’re also an organization that has figured that out.”
While the Heat have preached the aforementioned stability during the Pat Riley era, social media is replete with questions about the Heat’s mediocrity after last season’s 30-11 finish and the offseason expenditure of more than $200 million in contracts.
Spoelstra appreciates that ongoing aspect of his tenure.
“I almost forgot what it was like without it,” he said with a smile. “It just becomes your world. It just becomes your norm after a while.”
He said dealing with the expectations during the Heat’s Big Three era of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh has put everything that has ensued into perspective.
“I think going through that experience of the championship teams really helped a lot of us,” he said. “It probably doesn’t get much noisier than that. We are all forced to learn to compartmentalize and just focus on the things that matter.”
While Fizdale didn’t get to survive the Grizzlies’ absence of sidelined point guard Mike Conley, Popovich said the Heat have done right amid the transition away from the Big Three, citing the Heat’s rival from last season’s 11-30 start to a 41-41 finish.
“It’s always refreshing to have to deal with a problem or a new challenge,” Popovich said. “And Erik’s had to do that. He’s had to reinvent. Just look at last year, how they ended the season, how the second half went. I mean it was like a lobotomy all of a sudden, in a way. All of a sudden they went from a mediocre team to one hell of a team who nobody wanted to play.”