Spoelstra embraces fight to finish in playoff race
MIAMI — Where others see an unrelenting fight to the finish in the Eastern Conference playoff race beyond the top two seeds, Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra sees meaning and purpose.
Because he has lived both of the alternatives.
Asked before Thursday night’s game against the Philadelphia 76ers about teams being bunched so closely in the standings, including his own, Spoelstra said it beats either fighting for lottery seeding or playing out the string without regard to seeding.
“Boy, do I love it, though,” he said. “Because there are many different worlds in this profession.
“You can be on one end, where you’re fighting for and fighting very competitively and fiercely, unfortunately, the best draft pick you can get. You could be also preserving and trying to maintain and trying to get in without whatever, X, Y, Z. That is almost just as bad as fighting for the best lottery spot.
“In my mind, in my view, when you’re just hanging on and waiting for the playoffs, it’s equally as meaningless and as purposeless as the alternative.”
In 2007-08, it was all about lottery seeding for the Heat over the season’s final weeks, as was largely the case in 2014-15. Then there were the Big Three seasons with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, where seeding seemingly mattered less than getting to the playoffs in one piece.
Now there are Eastern Conference standings that feature a free-for-all for the playoff seeds beyond the Toronto Raptors and Boston Celtics at the top.
“We are in meaningful games and the fact that there are 18 left, man, we have a lot to be grateful for,” Spoelstra said. “If you took out the first two teams and you just put the losses of the rest of the teams ... giddyup. There’s a lot of opportunity ahead of us.” road loss to the Wizards.
The league, after the fact, said a violation should have been called on the Wizards, a play not subject to video review during games.
“We have the video where we put the clock on it,” Spoelstra said. “It’s over six seconds, six and change. It’s just disappointing that it’s that far off. If it was five and a tenth of a second, ‘OK, that’s human error.’ But it was over a full second off. That’s disappointing. The explanation after the fact was disappointing.
“That doesn’t mean that we were going to win the game. That didn’t decide the game. But there were a couple of big plays down the stretch that could have changed, certainly, the momentum and complexion of the game.”
The disappointment to Spoelstra was that his team had defended the Wizards into what should have been a turnover.
“The guys really covered a lot of ground and really went down to the very final option,” he said, “and at that point you didn’t even need to have the official clock, you know that that’s Washington too late by the time it reaches him. I don’t even need to look at it to know it was the wrong call.”
The NBA also said a late foul should have been called that would have sent the Heat’s Kelly Olynyk to the foul line for potential game-tying free throws with 4.8 seconds to play in a two-point game.
“At the end, also,” Spoelstra said, “there was a lot of contact on KOs.”