Miami Heat: Michael Jordan’s 92-93 Bulls prove Big 3 was hardest team to coach
The Big 3 Miami Heat were the hardest team to coach ever in the NBA, I firmly believe that. With all things considered, the 92-93 Chicago Bulls prove it.
The Miami Heat have always played hard. From most perspectives, in most years, no matter who’s on the team, and no matter the projected success of the team, you can always imagine them as being a great team to coach.
The Miami Heat culture and style of play almost dictates that there be a certain level of chemistry that would seem to automatically make one lean towards them being an easy team to coach. At least that is the case in most years.
With “most years” being the operative words in this example, I am firmly of the belief that the Big 3 era Miami Heat were the absolute hardest team ever to coach and a top three most difficult one at worst.
While many will look at the amount of talent on the team, three of the best players of their era, three top 20 guys in the league at the time, arguably the greatest player ever in LeBron James, the third-best shooting guard ever in Dwyane Wade, and a top 50 player in the history of the NBA in Chris Bosh, that isn’t the sum of the story when analyzing the difficulty of this team to coach.
What one should most consider when thinking about how hard it must have been for Erik Spoelstra to coach this team was the explosion of media, social media interaction and importance, the consistency of the coverage, and the fact that the 24-hour news cycle was starting to become standard practice.
The media coverage of the Big 3 era Miami Heat was not only absurd but unprecedented and borderline invasive at times. ESPN even developed a special niche website, daily segment, and theme of coverage that they called the Miami Heat Index to follow this team around, for crying out loud.
When you look at Michael Jordan‘s 1992-93 Chicago Bulls team, it was one that saw unprecedented coverage as well. Having the greatest professional athlete that the world has ever seen can do that for you.
Even though there has never been a global phenomenon quite like Michael Jordan was and although everything he touched or did went viral before going viral in the traditional sense was even a thing, media still wasn’t media as it is today. This means that it wasn’t as consistent, expansive, all-encompassing, interactive, or as big a part of our daily lives.
The Big 3 era Miami Heat could pick up their cell phones every morning and see millions upon millions of instant reactions to every little micrometer of a move that they made. This was simply not the case for Michael Jordan in 92-93 or any other year he played in the league.
While even that great Bulls team talked about how they experienced unprecedented coverage of everything Micahel Jordan did, how it impacted them, and how it made going about living their everyday lives more difficult, that was peanuts coverage wise to what that era of Miami Heat basketball had to endure and they were still able to achieve a ridiculous amount of success through it.
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That is how Michael Jordan’s 92-93 Bulls illustrate that the Big 3 Miami Heat was the hardest team to coach ever. If Michael Jordan could be shaken by the media coverage, but still refers to the difficulty of dealing with it, then the team that experienced, at minimal, four times that amount of media scrutiny has to be among the most difficult to coach ever, right?