Erik Spoelstra’s case for Coach of the Year
By Rob Slater
Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra has led an historic turnaround, and deserves to be in the conversation for his first Coach of the Year award.
Erik Spoelstra has three championship rings as a member of the Miami Heat, two as a head coach and one as an assistant. He’s also been to five NBA Finals, including four in a row, and racked up 428 wins since taking over the team in 2008.
In related news: Erik Spoelstra has exactly zero Coach of the Year awards. This is the year that changes.
It may be tough for those outside of Miami to understand that this season ranks as Spoelstra’s finest coaching job, even topping the glory days of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. The challenges thrown at Spoelstra and the Heat this season are without peer in the NBA, and yet here they sit, just a game and a half outside of the playoffs.
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With injuries claiming Justise Winslow after just eighteen games and also taking Dion Waiters, Josh Richardson and Josh McRoberts for extended time, Spoelstra was forced to rely on a patchwork roster put together in the hours following Wade’s decision to sign with the Chicago Bulls.
According to ManGamesLost, injuries have cost the Heat a total of 203 games, just second to the historically injury-prone Philadelphia 76ers (211) and a long way from the third-place Toronto Raptors (137).
Injuries are something the Golden State Warriors can afford. Even the Los Angeles Clippers can lose Chris Paul or Blake Griffin and maintain their standing. The Heat simply couldn’t afford to have the injury bug plague them and it showed throughout the first half of the year.
With a limited offensive gameplan, they’d live at the bottom of the league in points per game: 27th in November, 23rd in December and 28th in January. But Spoelstra never stopped preaching defense, with the team currently sixth in the league in defensive rating, essentially the only thing that kept them from falling even further into a hole that would have surely put them at the top of the draft lottery.
What all of this means in terms of Spoelstra’s Coach of the Year candidacy is that he definitively maximized his roster. Over the course of the season, 12 different players started games for Miami. Not among those names is James Johnson, who may be Spoelstra and the Heat’s most successful project this season.
Johnson morphed into a point-forward out of necessity as Tyler Johnson worked his way into the backup point guard role, and the career journeyman is playing some of the best basketball of his career, with highs in points, three-point percentage, rebounds and assists. Johnson is also one of the league’s most consistent defenders and the catalyst to the Heat’s defensive success this season.
There are other examples: the consistent development of Rodney McGruder and Willie Reed, the transformation and maximization of Wayne Ellington, Luke Babbitt and Dion Waiters (potentially the most unlikely of all).
Five players on the Heat are having career years according to their VORP and the team as a whole is charting in Golden State-territory on both ends of the floor since the All-Star break.
But realistically, is it too late for Spoelstra to enter the conversation? Many have pointed to Houston’s Mike D’Antoni for his impact on a perennially underachieving Rockets team. While D’Antoni certainly deserves praise, as does Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich among many others, if Spoelstra can get the Heat to the playoffs after an abysmal first half of the year, he deserves the award.
For reference, however, if the Heat fall short of the playoffs and Spoelstra still wins Coach of the Year, he would become the first winner to miss the playoffs since Doc Rivers in 1999-2000 with the Orlando Magic. However, the notion of an early summer, or awards in general, seem to be far from the coach’s mind.
"“Those kind of things make every coach awkward,” Spoelstra said, via the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, after being awarded Coach of the Month for February. “It’s a culture award, it’s an organizational award. That’s how we view it. And if it happens, it usually means that there has to be some wins involved. So, as an organization, we’ll take it.”"
As Spoelstra is not willing to praise himself, his peers have filled that void. Detroit Pistons coach and former Heat head coach Stan Van Gundy led the charge, saying “there’s not a better coach in the league than Erik.” He continued, “People discounted him because he had LeBron and Wade and Bosh. Gregg Popovich is one of the best ever, Phil Jackson. But nobody goes to four straight finals. Nobody. He did.”
Van Gundy’s point raises another—Spoelstra should have sewed up an award of his very own for winning the Eastern Conference four years in a row on the way to two rings. In those years, Tom Thibodeau, Gregg Popovich (twice) and George Karl were all honored.
Spoelstra’s Heat dispatched Thibodeau’s Bulls in five games in the Eastern Conference Finals and two years later defeated Popovich’s Spurs in seven games for their second-straight NBA title. Scott Brooks, another Coach of the Year winner, also fell to Miami in the Finals.
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Spoelstra’s career achievements do not factor into his worth for this year’s award, however, and shouldn’t overshadow the masterpiece he is crafting this season. He’s taking undrafted D-Leaguers (McGruder), spare parts from other teams (James Johnson, Luke Babbitt, Wayne Ellington, Dion Waiters) and molding them into the Heat culture he has championed on a daily basis.