Miami Heat Need A New Coach for TMZ Lifestyle...And No, It's Not Pat Riley
That’s it.
The Heat need a new coach.
And it’s pretty obvious that there’s only one person familiar with the situation that can just step in and sort this whole mess out.
He’s in his 60s, sports short gray hair with traces of youthful black and has spent plenty of time in LA.
Clearly, the man needed for the job is TMZ-founder Harvey Levin.
(Oh, did you think I was referring to Pat Riley? Not the case. I suppose Levin could bring him on board to hand out Bling H20 to the players, though. That is what they drink on the bench, right?)
The final straw came on Saturday in a 106-95 loss to the Mavs.
By now, you’ve all seen it over million times and counting.
And if you haven’t, well ladies and gentlemen, I now present to you without further ado:
With just one potentially accidental shoulder nudge from the always-courteous LeBron James, Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra had the last strands of coaching DNA instantly eviscerated from his genetic makeup right before our eyes, again and again, thanks to the wondrous technological advancement known as DVR.
With one simple prod, the 40-year-old coach was transported back to the days of being an NBA nobody, cast aside in the shadows of three meaty egos.
Or so we’re led to believe.
While Spoelstra’s hands are far from clean in the overall situation down in Miami (and yes, it has developed into a “situation”), the media blitz surrounding all minute details of this team has been so astoundingly absurd that I’m expecting a sequel to “The Truman Show” to be released early next year, starring James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Only in this one, the world somehow figures out a way to watch every aspect of the subject’s life more than twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
An obviously impossible idea, but a route things seem to be headed down with the coverage that all of that talent in South Beach has received to date.
(Side note: the “24/7+” idea is science which I believe Levin and the honorable workers at TMZ to be working on so they can further invade our eyes and ears on an even more persistent level. It may even involve some form of time travel, who knows? Also, word has it that their goal is to deliver scoops to us through all five senses. I’m particularly worried about my sense of smell.)
In all likelihood, LeBron wasn’t the first player to bump into his coach this season—on purpose or accidentally. These things just happen on an NBA court.
“I didn't even notice it until people mentioned it after the game,” Spoelstra said. “Often, coming out of the timeout, it's a pinball game, colliding into a lot of people. So it's probably a perfect case of over-speculation.”
Exactly.
Over-speculation.
But he and his players have allowed the nonsense to get to this point and “incidents” like this become, well, incidents. If it were any other team, it couldn’t be any less of a story, but they wanted the attention. They wanted the coverage. Had things been going positively for the 10-8 Heat, they’d be basking in the sunlight of praise, popularity and partying with Lil Wayne.
Instead, the attention and coverage has focused on the blatant mediocrity of a franchise that dropped everything it was doing to re-sign Wade, bring in a couple of highly-touted problem children All-Stars, and fill out the roster with the likes of Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Juwan Howard to babysit.
And the tension is pushing people to the breaking point.
“A coach-player relationship in this league often will be confrontational at times,'' Spoelstra said. “At other times, it's smooth sailing. Just the dynamic of the competitive nature of everybody, expectations, results, all these things combined, yes, sometimes it will get testy. That's good.”
That’s good?
Surprisingly, testy superstar-coach relationships are often one-sided in terms of who gets to keep their job.
Even more so if it’s a trio of superstars.
Needless to say, don’t be surprised if Harvey Levin announces his candidacy to take over for Spoelstra on TMZ on TV sometime in the near future.
Either way, just be prepared to ride this non-stop, in-your-face-at-all-times media wave until at least 2014—the first year any of them can opt out of this mistake they’ve created for themselves.
