What Heat coach Erik Spoelstra had to say on exit interview day
With the Miami Heat missing the playoffs for the first time since 2019, the team held its annual exit interviews at Kaseya Center on Thursday at Kaseya Center.
Heat coach Erik Spoelstra and some players will speak to the media. Player participation is voluntary, so some players will opt not to speak to reporters.
Here’s what Spoelstra had to say to the media on Thursday ...
- Will the Heat continue to use the fast-paced offense it introduced this season?: “It will depend on the roster, but there were definitive boosts in our scoring and ability to put more points on the board. It was a big jump. ... There’s opportunity to take it to another level with efficiency, and most importantly being able to it against the better defenses in the league.”
- What was Spoelstra’s reaction when he saw the NBA upgraded LaMelo Ball’s trip of Bam Adebayo to a Flagrant 2 foul after further review?: “I’m not really thinking about that anymore. ... I don’t think he’s a dirty player. ... It should have been caught in that moment, but it wasn’t. And you move on.”
- Spoelstra said he comes out of this season more comfortable playing the double-big look of Adebayo and Kel’el Ware together than he was at the start of this season.
- On missing the playoffs for the first time since 2019: “We’re going to be highly motivated. We don’t like this feeling of being off in the middle of April.” But Spoelstra also said the fact that the Heat made the playoffs for six straight seasons before missing the playoff this season shouldn’t be overlooked.
- On his final message to this season’s Heat team: “I enjoyed the relationships, I enjoyed how this group tried to come together. Training camp felt like six weeks ago to me. It’s amazing how fast the season goes. ... We weren’t able to necessarilly maximize what we felt the potential of this group could be, but there were still some good takeaways.”
Spoelstra highlighted the development of the Heat’s young players as a positive from this season, including Ware’s growth.
Spoelstra added that forward Jaime Jaquez Jr. “had a great bounce back year,” guard Pelle Larsson had a “massive jump,” and guard Kaspras Jakucionis “surprised all of us.”
- What needs to happen for the Heat to close the gap with the rest of the Eastern Conference: “We’ll figure that out, as we always do. That’s our mission in this building. We’re going to get to work this summer and figure this out. ... We’re going to focus on how we can get better and get back into the discussion.”
- Spoelstra compared forward Nikola Jovic’s rough season to the Jaquez’s shaky second NBA season before Jaquez’s bounce-back year this season: “As frustrated as he seemed this year and he felt like he just had a string of bad luck, that’s exactly what happened to Jaime last year. ... I think that’s Niko’s objective this offseason to not have a victim mindset about it and not blame anything, and just get to work and improve.”
Spoelstra believes Jovic “will be just fine.”
“What he does fits,” Spoelstra added about Jovic.
- Spoelstra believes the Heat would have been able to make the pairing of Tyler Herro and Norman Powell work, but they just ran out of time due to both players’ injury issues this season: “It ended up becoming a challenge at the very end. I think we would have been able to do it, I think they could have been dynamic. It was just unfortunate.”
- On his favorite part of the season: “The beginning of the season, i felt like there was an energy and a momentum. It felt like we were catching some teams by surprise. I thought we were going to build from that.”
The Heat began the season with a 14-7 record.
This story was originally published April 16, 2026 at 12:38 PM.
