Erik Spoelstra trying to stay positive and keep Heat connected during NBA shutdown
Even though there are no games amid the coronavirus pandemic, Erik Spoelstra’s work as the Miami Heat’s head coach has not necessarily stopped.
But the way Spoelstra works has changed. The hours are different, the way he interacts with his staff and players is different and his perspective on life and the job is even different.
With NBA facilities closed indefinitely and people across the country practicing social distancing during the league’s shutdown, there are daily team workouts with Heat players and staff over the Zoom remote conferencing platform. Spoelstra also organizes Zoom meetings with his coaching staff every other day.
“Much of this is just to give everybody a routine and something to build their day around,” Spoelstra said on a conference call with local reporters Wednesday afternoon. “These are not 12-hour days. We have plenty of time to prepare. We know how to grind, we know how to work. This is not what this is about. This is about connecting, having a couple projects to do each day to be able to keep your mind engaged and active.”
The workouts give Heat players an opportunity to interact, with Spoelstra noting “the first five to 10 minutes are guys just catching up with each other and cracking jokes. It’s like they’re in the locker room before practice just messing around, having fun.”
And Spoelstra has kept meetings part of the routine for his coaching staff to “connect” and “to continue to work and prepare for a possibility that the season will resume.”
“We’re certainly not working around the clock right now,” Spoelstra said. “I think a lot of the coaching staff, we have young families, so we’re spending an inordinate amount of time trying to be helpful around the house. We’re gone so much during the season, and we travel, that this has been a new reality for a lot of us. And I can speak for a lot of the guys on the coaching staff, I really am just trying to be helpful around the house and taking a little bit of a load off my wife.”
Spoelstra and wife, Nikki, have two sons — 2-year-old Santiago and three-month-old Dante. If there’s one positive to be taken from an unfortunate situation, Spoelstra pointed to the extra time he has been able to spend at home with the NBA season suspended.
Spoelstra, 49, said he has “spent more time in the swimming pool in the last 10 days than I had probably in the last 10 years without a doubt.”
“We want to stay positive, and it has been an incredible blessing to be around our family much more often,” Spoelstra said. “We’re able to spend our meals together. I wake up every single morning and not in a rush to do anything. I can be at breakfast. I’m barbecuing every single night. I’ve never been a barbecue guy. I’ve always been a takeout, order out guy, but now I’m cooking meals for this family. I’ve had a lot of peace of mind doing that every afternoon.
“I think we’re thinking about other people, but in our own worlds you can see how there can be some productive things out of this and how you can look at things from a different perspective.”
Spoelstra said he has tried to view isolation as physical distancing rather than social distancing. So, he has spent some of his recent free time connecting with friends and family.
Trying to stay positive through a tough situation, Spoelstra said he has worn a shirt that reads “Stay positive” almost every other day because “it helps me stay focused on that.”
Spoelstra added: “This is such an unusual, unsure time for so many of us, that you really want to focus on controlling what you can control — that’s your positive outlook, that’s spending time with people you love, and then also, for us, what we’ve talked a lot about is trying to take care of people that aren’t as fortunate as us.”
That uncertainty surrounding everyday life is one of the reasons Spoelstra believes coaches and players around the NBA will have a new perspective than they did before this experience.
“I do believe that when we get back to doing what we love to do,” Spoelstra said, “that our entire industry will have more gratitude for this beautiful game that we’re involved in and that we’re able to express ourselves in a competitive way and make an occupation out of it. I truly do hope there won’t be talk of the dog days or anything like that during the middle of an 82-game season. I think anybody would take any of those days right now.”
Whether it’s playing in front of an empty arena or playing in a different venue, Spoelstra said he feels like players and coaches around the league are open to anything. What sounded like a crazy idea a month ago isn’t so crazy anymore.
“We’re facing a new normal, whatever that will be, whenever that is,” Spoelstra said. “I think everybody is open to that right now. The league is working diligently. But you can’t really make plans other than hypotheticals right now. But I think from talking to our players and to the staff, I think everybody is just excited and open to a new norm, a new normal, whenever that happens.”
Spoelstra encouraged the public to donate to Feeding South Florida, which is the largest, most efficient food bank serving Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe counties. Donate at Heat.com/donate.
This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 5:48 PM.
