The obvious overreaction to the Miami Heat's loss to the Boston Celtics last night would be to fire head coach Erik Spoelstra. LeBron James knows this, and everyone in the entire universe knows this, because a 5-4 record, even this early, is pretty unacceptable.
LeBron James’ Solution To The Miami Heat’s Issues: ‘Play Me Less’
Quotes like these won't exactly help Spoelstra's cause, of course. A couple days after saying Jazz coach Jerry Sloan "kind of figured out what we wanted to do," James had this to say about how he was deployed by Spoelstra. Via Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo!
"For myself, 44 minutes is too much," James declared. "I think Coach Spo knows that. Forty minutes for D-Wade is too much. We have to have as much energy as we can to finish games out."
I think Coach Spo knows that. No, actually, now Spoelstra “knows” that, LeBron. The Heat have just lost a huge game because their players fell way behind while cowering in fear to the mighty Boston Celtics, and James wants to talk about how he was tired in the final few minutes. Guys like Wojnarowski are just sitting there waiting to feast on stuff like that.
But the larger issue, to me, is James’ logic. He feels like he needs to play fewer minutes to close out a game better, but he doesn’t realize that his team was so bad last night that he needed to play 44 minutes to even get them that close. If James plays five fewer minutes last night, or if Wade plays four fewer minutes, the Heat get blown out even more than they do. They just don’t have the depth to hang with the Celtics with James and Wade playing 36 minutes a game.
James knew this going in, and yet he’s still complaining about his minutes and pinning it back on his coach. I’m not going to go on one of those silly “MJ wouldn’t do this!” rants, because we learned LeBron wasn’t MJ this summer when he went to Miami. But I will say that, once again, his stunning lack of awareness is hurting his team.
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