It's a hard task to maintain 3 superstars and get them to listen to you and buy in to your system. It's hard enough to have 3 main ball handlers to come together and play. On top of this, he has to live up to massive expectations year after year. On top of all of these, he developed other players to fit into their roles perfectly. If he is not one of the top coaches, then I don't know who is. The only ones I can think of that could be worth debatable is Carlisle (great in-game execution and adjustments), and Thibs (great schemes and strategies with limited players). Pops is obviously undebatable.
He proved he's more than competent. Great coach? I don't know about that. But the expectations of the coach is to be competent, since there are more than a few incompetent coaches in the league. In my opinion, it's mostly the players because without the right players, a coach can't win. 95-99% is on the players. That said, a sign of a bad coach is consistently losing the close games. Key decision-making mistakes down the stretch, or not instilling discipline in his players for crunchtime, those are signs of bad coaching. A good coach will have his team overachieving relative to the players' talents, or atleast meeting its expectations of the teams potential. A good coach get take an average team to the playoffs regularly, or even win 50 games. A great coach is more than an in-game coach. He's a coach who brings in the right players, knows how to use them, how to develop them, and has a longevity of prolonged sustained success; ala Popovich.
This! When you have 3 of the top 10 players in the league as much hate as Mike Brown gets he got to the finals with less talent Rocket River
Talent is way more important to success than having a balanced lineup. The Heat simply have way more talent than anyone else. The best analogy is the Clyde/Barkley/Dream Rockets, except 4 years younger! Our geezer team went 57-25 even with Matt Maloney and Mario Elie (already 33 years old) filling out the lineup. It just doesn't matter if Chalmers, Birdman, Battier, and Haslem aren't great. The only things they have to do are not get destroyed on defense and then hit a few wide open shots. Maloney could only do one of those things. I think you and I agree on about where Spoelstra is in the coaching ranks. He's ok, but this Heat team could coach itself. Even with the big egos, it's not like he's Phil Jackson having to keep Dennis Rodman in line.
I think he is a lot smarter than people give him credit for especially on defense... and the way he made it to be an NBA head coach gives me hope that I may one day be able to coach the best team of my generation.
Is Phil Jackson the greatest coach ever? Or did he just win because he had Jordan, Shaq, and Kobe in their primes. It will be the same question with Spoelstra. At the end of the day I think you are a great coach if you win. Period.
Well, the questions about Jackson didn't resolve until he won with the Lakers, too. Those Lakers teams were not head and shoulders above the rest but Phil managed to pull out wins over some impressive Blazers, Kings and Spurs teams. Then he did it again with the Pau/Kobe team. If Wade were to retire and Spoelstra could win with just Lebron and Bosh, then that would be a lot more impressive.
No,you underestimate how bad McHale is. The team would end up giving up 20 point leads in the 4th quarter, everyone would be playing 40 mpg, no one would play D, and it'd be iso moves all 4th quarter and they would lose.
I (and I would assume 99.5% of clutchfans) have no real way to evaluate on whether or not he is a top 5 coach in the league. But, during HEAVY criticism, one of the greatest basketball minds of all time decided to keep him around and gave him 100% support. That's all I need to know in order to know that he is a great coach.
He's better than the likes of McHale and Scott Brooks...but that's not saying much. I think Spo is an above-average coach, but not great or elite. He will be exposed eventually.
Nobody will ever know. Any coach with that team would succeed unless they literally benched the big three all game long.
LOL so many doubters here. First of all coach Spo is at the very least above average when it comes to coaching, people talking about how the Heat are the most talented or it is all LBJ etc have no clue, if coaches don't matter and its all the players who do the winning why is it Houston got their ass slammed by a CLEARLY inferior team in Portland? The Heat is a top heavy unit, you can easily torpedo that by a bad coach with the players running lots of ISO sets, bad PT mgt with everyone playing over 40 mins a night and of course bad D and subs. And yet coach Spo has everyone playing disciplined D, he has good plays off time outs and the it's not all the big 3, guys like Battier and Ray Allen play meaningful minutes as well. More importantly though, Spo is one of the youngest coaches in the league right now, he has very little experience in comparison to lifers like Pops and Thibs etc. Those guys have peaked or are in their peak coaching wise, Spo still has a lot of stuff to learn. He's still going to improve, and with the Heat always going deep in the playoffs his improvement will be even quicker.
The people comparing Spo to McHale are clueless. They are on completely different tiers. Spo is a far superior coach to the clueless incompetent bottom 5 NBA coach McHale. If it was all about talent, then there is no way Rockets should have their asses beaten by Portland. Talent can take yu through the regular season but come playoff time, coaching absolutely matters irrespective fo the talent. Every little attention to detail, the X's and O's, calling plays, taking timeouts, right rotations etc.
Spolly is a great coach in my opinion. It seems to me he enjoys what he does and he is as active on the floor (animated) as any great coach can be. He can actually draw up plays and the players seem to follow his lead. The "inside-trax" on TNT/ESPN tend to show how he directs his players on the court. He loves the game.
Because the favorites don't always win. Even a team who is favored to win 90% of the time, which we weren't even close to that heavily favored, still loses 10% of the time. Coaching matters and played some minor role in our loss, but in our series I would say missing shots we made all season combined with LMA going god mode for the first 2 games were the main culprits for the series loss.
