Erik Spoelstra as a Coach

Erik Spoelstra has been working for the Miami Heat since 1995, when he joined the coaching staff as a mere video coordinator. Both ambitious and undeniably bright, Spoelstra burned through many promotions over the last 16 years and today he sits as head coach for the Miami Heat. Here I take a look at the Miami Heat’s regular season history during its time with Erik Spoelstra, starting in 2001 when Spoelstra was promoted to assistant coach and director of scouting. Below I collected data over the last ten years in Miami Heat Basketball (since Spoelstra’s promotion in 2001). The data I collect is for each “regular season” meaning all the games an NBA team plays before the playoffs. So here are the last ten years of Heat basketball with Erik Spoelstra on the high-level coaching staff…

Remember that this data is from the regular seasons and does not include playoff history for the Miami Heat. Calculations show that the average, or mode, proportion of games won/games lost over the last ten years has been 0.5134. Because these data points are not selected from a sample of a larger population, the standard deviation for an entire population must be computed. This standard deviation is 0.1603.

So,

There are two important factors to note before analyzing Erik Spoelstra’s coaching performance since 2001. From late 2008 until present day Erik Spoelstra has given up his previous job as assistant coach and director of scouting to fill bigger shoes as the team’s head coach. Also the team recently received a mass of new talent with the arrival of superstars Chris Bosh and LeBron James for its latest season (2010-1011). These two changes have definitely contributed to the team’s recent success. Although certainly no outlier [Q3+(1.5IQR) = 0.9265], the latest season’s winning percentage has a z-score of 1.208 which is a considerable departure from the norm (but not actually considered “unusual”, as unusual data points have z-scores with an absolute value of over two).

The data shows that Erik Spoelstra was most effective as head coach, and after his promotion the team enjoyed above average seasons (positive z-scores), showing that team success increased after Spoelstra moved up in the coaching staff. Certainly the addition of new talent coupled with the coaching skills of Erik Spoelstra has produced one of the best Miami Heat teams in the last decade.

 

Data gathered from wikipedia and nbauniverse.com.