“But what did he do?” I can hear you thinking. “Any coach can roll the ball out for those three guys and earn a bunch of wins, right?”
I could build a case that simply keeping the Heat doing what they do for this long merits serious consideration for Erik Spoelstra as coach of the year: •Keeping calm and carrying on through incredible highs (a title, second-longest winning streak in NBA history) and lows (assembling one of the league’s most notorious superteams and then not winning it all, not to mention the biggest horse pill of invective and doubt in NBA history).
•Building and maintaining relationships with a prickly array of powerbrokers — any one of whom could undermine him — from Pat Riley and Micky Arison to LeBron James and Dwyane Wade.
•Improving a great team.
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