In his NY Times article, Harvey Araton makes the case that the Miami Heat won’t right themselves until they have someone “who has enough courtside juice on a nightly basis to help [LeBron James] grasp the axiomatic logic that everyone will eventually be better off when less of [James] becomes more.” He with the juice, insists Araton, is Pat Riley, “who, in most cases, outranks the King.”
Araton suggests that the Heat situation comes down to a matter of inserting a coach with more “clout” than LBJ. I respectfully disagree.
Riley is a classic Badass—one who leads like an alpha dog, and aggressively takes on anyone standing between him and a complete hold on power.
Araton presents James as an accidental recipient of his go-to guy role who, because he hasn’t yet played for a coach with clout, has been forced to assume the ball in crunch time. There seems to be an implicit assumption that Riley, as head coach, would finally be the one to look LBJ in the eye and tell him he’s just not good enough in last-second shot situations to warrant the ball…and that LBJ would acquiesce.
Mr. Araton…how much NBA have do you watch these days? The NBA is a league driven by its stars. And in spite of his ludicrously staged “Decision” last summer (or, perhaps, because of it), LBJ is the NBA’s brightest one. We recently saw a (relatively speaking) second-rate star in Deron Williams drive out head coaching legend, Jerry Sloan, because of their season-long battle for supremacy of the Utah Jazz.
Sure, LBJ might give up the ball to D-Wade or Bosch, but not because some Badass coach comes out of retirement and so insists. LBJ will give up the ball when and only when he comes to terms with the fact that it’s in his team’s (and his!) best interest. And he’ll only come to terms with that fact when and only when he has a say in the matter.
The Heat don’t need a Badass for a head coach, they need a Player –one who cajoles and collaborates and strokes egos and pulls strings while he discreetly gets his needs met. A Player needs to bring LBJ and Wade together and help them reach a consensus about how to fix what’s not going well. If a Player can get LBJ and Wade to come up with the “new plan” then they are more likely to own it, and it is therefore more likely to succeed.
Look, current Heat head coach, Erik Spoelstra, might just be that Player. Let’s face it, he’s had a tumultuous season, but each time it appeared as if the wheels were coming completely off, he managed to get the team back on track. More precisely, he allowed D-Wade and LBJ to assert their authority on the team and come up with a new plan of attack.
The cure for the self-entitled superstar is not a Badass who will struggle for authority – that’s the sure way to abruptly end this latest Big Three experiment. The cure lies within Spoelstra’s Player, who can pull the right strings to get his stars to scrap their current end-of-game play and come up with one with a new ending.
About Sean O'Neil
Sean O’Neil is an expert in workplace and team dynamics. He is also Principal and CEO of One to One Leadership (www.one2oneleadership.com), a sales and management training firm with clients that include the National Basketball Association, Major League Soccer, News Corporation, First Data, ADP, Xerox, the Oakland Raiders and the New York Knicks. Sean and John Kulisek co-authored Bare Knuckle People Management: Creating Success with the Team You Have – Winners, Losers, Misfits and All, which is due to be published in May 2011. Sean has contributed to or been featured in, among others, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Selling Power Magazine and Incentive Magazine.
