Erik Spoelstra is one of the most respected, and highest-paid, head coaches in the NBA, with a reputation for disciplined play and getting the most out of his players for more than a decade. Even he will make some bad mistakes.
He just happened to make a season’s worth of them in the span of two seconds on Tuesday, with one of them bringing back bad memories for bystander Jalen Rose.
A mistake-riddled stretch saw Spoelstra’s Miami Heat blow a lead against the Detroit Pistons with only 1.8 seconds remaining in overtime. Holding a 121-119 lead after a Detroit timeout, the trouble began when the Heat nearly came out of the break with six men on the floor.
Kel’el Ware got off the floor in time, but the confusion presaged Miami getting burnt on the Pistons’ ATO play, which ended with a Jalen Duren alley-oop to tie the game. Spoelstra was so frustrated he immediately called timeout.
The problem was, Spoelstra didn’t have any timeouts left.
That earned the Heat a technical foul, sending Malik Beasley to the free-throw line. He made the shot to put the Pistons up a point with 1.1 seconds left.
It’s unclear if it was intentional or not, but the camera immediately cutting to Rose, a former NBA player and ESPN personality, was incredible work. Rose was one of the stars of the “Fab Five” Michigan team that lost the 1993 NCAA championship game against UNC because Chris Webber infamously called a timeout he did not have.
Spoelstra fully owned the mistake after the game, calling it a horrendous error:
“I just made a serious mental error there at the end. That’s on me. I feel horrible about it. There’s really no excuse for that. I’m 17 years in. We had talked about it in the huddle. I knew we didn’t have anything, I just got emotional and reactive on that and I just made a horrendous mistake.
“You don’t want it to come down to a mental error like that … It deserved to go double OT and not have somebody get in the way of that. Unfortunately, even as a veteran coach, I got in the way of that.”
That actually wasn’t the end of Spoelstra’s mistakes. After the timeout blunder, he proceeded to sub in outlet-pass maestro Kevin Love for a full-court pass, as advancing the ball wasn’t possible due to his lack of timeouts. Unfortunately, because it was a technical foul, it was still Pistons ball.
The end result was a foul on Beasley, who made another free throw, and an embarrassing loss to open NBA Cup play.
The ending erased a huge fourth quarter for the Heat, who trailed by 14 at one point in the frame and reeled off a 9-0 run at the end of regulation to send the game to overtime. It was a typical gritty Heat win, until it became an inexplicably sloppy Heat loss.
