Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Past and future
Spoelstra, team reflect on what might have been
Heat’s Spoelstra will use lessons learned next season.
MIAMI — It was shortly after he faced his team following last week’s end of the season and before Monday’s exit meetings when Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra took stock of what had been missing in 2016-17. Just about an entire team. “I was going through all the things starting my autopsy of the season,” Spoelstra said Monday before addressing his players at AmericanAirlines Arena, “and then you realize, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”
Because during a season when the mantra was, “we have enough,” and when that nearly proved to be the case in the push back from at 11-30 at midseason to 41-41, there was no time for excuses.
So instead of preparing for playoff games, Spoelstra went back to the injury ledger, finally allowing for reality.
No Dion Waiters for the final 13 games. No Wayne Ellington for the first 16. A 19-game stretch without Josh Richardson. No Justise Winslow for the second half of the season.
And then it struck him, with no more bouncing balls to muffle his thoughts: for all the Heat accomplished amid the 2016-17 revival, he never coached the team he took out of training camp.
“And then you realize,” he said, “the only guys that were really staples that you could put a name to every single night were Hassan [Whiteside], Goran [Dragic] and a guy that none of us had planned on being that guy, Rodney McGruder, coming out of training camp. Everybody else was dealing with some kind of adversity during the year.
“... we’re able to reflect on a group that came together ... and developed a sense of community ...” Erik Spoelstra
“So if all those guys were available, then I would have been dealing with a lot of different managerial personality challenges, and I would have welcomed that, because we would have had a lot more depth. But who knows how that would have impacted the season?”
Only Spoelstra does, and that’s why Monday was more upbeat than Spoelstra’s media session on this same podium five days earlier, when the reality of a season without playoffs hit home.
Because while he got to experience the potential of Richardson and Ellington at season’s end, and while he relished the revival of Waiters prior, the complete Heat never truly had the opportunity to coalesce.
That, to a man, had every player who spoke Monday of similar thought: More. Please.
“If we’re able to reflect on it,” Spoelstra said, “we’re able to reflect on a group that came together as strangers, really came together and developed a sense of community, of team and it became a season that we’ll remember.
“There’s some seasons that don’t necessarily imprint on your mind. This will be a season that a bunch of strangers that came together in October, that we’ll see each other years from now along the NBA road, in the NBA circles, and be able to have that bond. That’s special and that was created by being pushed to the brink.”
Shortly thereafter, players such as Waiters, Ellington, Willie Reed, James Johnson, each facing freeagency decisions, spoke of staying together, but each also acknowledging the economic realities of a salary-cap league.
“Hopefully,” Spoelstra said, “this is dot . . . dot . . . dot . . . continued, and we can build on this.”
That had Monday different than a typical clean-outyour-lockers day. Many of those lockers look today as they were after the seasonending victory over the Washington Wizards.
“Lockers are still going to be there. We want our guys to still feel at home,” Spoelstra said, but also adding, “free agency is going to happen.
“We’re not taking down their lockers and shipping over their gear to them. Their practice gear and shoes will be there. Hopefully we’ll have guys — even the ones that have freeagent triggers — that will be back working out with us after a few weeks.”
That’s what Monday proved to be about. Players, one after another, reaffirming commitment.
And, reaffirming health. Waiters said he would have been ready for the playoffs, healed from from his badly sprained left ankle. Richardson said — finally — nothing hurt. Winslow said he is now only weeks away from full-court work. No surgeries, Spoelstra said, are pending.
“The injuries we had,” Spoelstra said, “guys just need a little bit of time. The positive of it is I think we’ll have guys in the gym early summer.”
And if the same group were to return, picking up where they left off, with injuries out of the equation, could this have been a contender?
“We do feel,” Spoelstra said, “that if this group gets a chance to dot . . . dot . . . dot . . . be continued, yes.”