Monday, April 2, 2012

Miami Heat’s road woes spell trouble for title hopes


Pat Riley is a pretty good judge of talent and he’s a very patient person. He has been trying his best to let head coach Erik Spoelstra do things his way but if things don’t change soon then the Miami Heat will end the season the same way they ended the last one; watching another team raise its championship banners.


Not that Spoelstra is a bad coach but he is as much to blame for the Heat’s failures as the players themselves. He’s just not an X’s and O’s guy and it shows in the Heat’s offensive execution.

Spoelstra is a defensive coach who prepares his team very well to slow down opposing teams offensively but the Heat run very few offensive plays of their own during the course of a game.

Which works most of the time because Wade and James are such great individual scorers that they open up the floor for others to score. And Miami’s defense is so smothering that the Heat usually create a lot of scoring opportunities off of their defense.

Still the Heat seem to get beaten by less talented teams because Spoelstra constantly gets out-coached on the offensive side of the ball. That’s what happened in last season’s NBA Finals when the Heat went up against the Dallas Mavericks.

The Mavericks weren’t as talented as the Heat but Spoelstra had a hard time finding answers for all of the different lineups that the Mavericks’ head coach Rick Carlisle threw at him. If Carlisle saw that a specific lineup was giving the Heat trouble then he would stick with it until the Heat proved they could defend it then he would move on to another one.

Spoelstra did a very poor job of making adjustments to what Carlisle was doing which ultimately cost the Heat the series. And Spoelstra’s coaching inefficiencies have continued to rear their head this season.

Sure the Heat’s players may be a little worn down which could be contributing to their current road slump but there is no way that the Heat should lose to the Bulls when Rose is out, lose by 25 points to the Indiana Pacers or let the aging Boston Celtics beat them by nearly 20 points.

Or maybe we’re jumping the gun a little bit. The Heat haven’t lost a home game since January 22nd so Spoelstra has to be doing something right. Right?

And sure it doesn’t help that every team in the league sees the Miami Heat as the team to beat so teams play them harder than they would most other teams. It’s still strange though that this team has been losing so much on the road when all three of their best players have been on the floor.

Which reflects poorly not just on the players but on the guy who is most responsible for getting them ready to play every game. The good news for the Heat is that they only have five more road games left this season.

That could also be seen as bad news since they won’t have many games to work out their road problems before they enter the playoffs. But playing so many of their remaining games at home puts them in a good position to make a run for the top spot in the Eastern Conference.

And if the Heat can continue their dominance at home then they may be able to catch the Bulls and secure home court advantage throughout the playoffs. An advantage they may need considering how poorly they have played on the road.

Roosevelt Hall is an NFL Blogger for The Sport Mentalist and an NBA Blogger for The Sport Mentalist 2. He is also a Sports Reporter for Pro Sports Lives. He can be contacted at RHall_TPFB@Yahoo.com and be sure to follow him on Twitter @sportmentalist.

 

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