It's no secret that the Miami Heat are an improved team since Thanksgiving — they opened their first season with LeBron James and Chris Bosh at 9-8, they held a few panicked team meetings, and since then they've turned around and won 30 of their last 36 games.
The cliched reasons are all out there — LeBron is more comfortable, Dwyane Wade is healthier, Bosh has found his role. But Doc Rivers, whose Celtics face the new-look Heat for the third time on Sunday afternoon, has another theory about the turnaround in Miami. He thinks it's about coaching.
"I think they trust Erik Spoelstra more," Rivers said. "That takes time. When you bring a lot of new players in, it takes a lot of time for them to trust your stuff. Early on, they just didn't have that trust, and now I think they have it. You can see it in their play. They're a better team."
Spoelstra, an inexperienced head coach who began this season at age 39 with a 90-74 career record, was slow to establish control of his players. There were rumors of tension between Spoelstra and the Heat for weeks when they first got together, and those rumors gathered steam with the infamous bump between LeBron and his coach on Nov. 27.
But according to Rivers, it's common for players to have a slow adjustment period with a new coach — not just in terms of team chemistry, but also with the X's and O's aspect of the game. He experienced that same problem himself.
"Absolutely," the Celtics' coach said. "I mean, it's a whole new system. I thought our guys early on, we got off to a great start, but I don't think we really trusted it until the second half of the year. It's just tough. It's a whole new system. Some of it may not even be about trust — some of it's just that it wasn't second nature to them. After the first option, they tended to go with isolations or individual plays.
"It just takes time."
