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 serious mistakes.
Coincidentally, he turned it into a season in the span of two seconds on Tuesday, one of which brought back bad memories for bystander Jalen Rose.
A mistake-filled mistake gave Spoelstra’s Miami Heat a lead against the Detroit Pistons with just 1.8 seconds left in overtime. Leading 121-119 after a Detroit timeout, the trouble started 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 predicted Miami would get burned by the Pistons’ ATO play, which ended with a Jalen Duren alley-oop to tie the game. Spoelstra was so frustrated that he immediately called a timeout.
The problem was that Spoelstra was out of timeouts.
That earned the Heat a technical foul, sending Malik Beasley to the free-throw line. He made the shot to put the Pistons within one 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 to UNC because Chris Webber infamously called a timeout he didn’t have.
Spoelstra fully acknowledged the mistake after the match, calling it a terrible mistake:
“I just made a serious mental mistake there at the end. That’s my fault. I feel terrible about it. There’s really no excuse for that. I’m 17 years later. We had talked about it in the conversation. I knew that we hadn’t done that.” I have nothing, I got emotional and reactive about it and I just made a terrible mistake.
“You don’t want it to come down to a mental mistake like that… I deserved to go double OT and not have anyone get in the way of that. Unfortunately, even as an experienced coach, I got in the way of that.”
That wasn’t actually the end of Spoelstra’s mistakes. After the timeout blunder, he proceeded to substitute outlet pass maestro Kevin Love for a full-court pass as advancing the ball was not possible due to his lack of timeouts. Unfortunately, because it was a technical foul, it was still the 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 managed a 9-0 run at the end of regulation time, sending the game to overtime. It was a typical gritty Heat win, until it became an inexplicably sloppy Heat loss.
