MIAMI — Klay Thompson didn’t sleep particularly well before his first training camp practice with the Miami Heat.
It wasn’t nerves, wasn’t a bad hotel room, wasn’t anything like that.
The problem was Erik Spoelstra. And it was a good problem to have.
The Miami coach — entering his 19th season with the Heat, by far the longest current tenure of any coach in the NBA — always addresses his team on the night before the start of camp. And what Spoelstra said in this season’s kickoff speech had Thompson so fired up that getting rest proved difficult, if not impossible.
“He cares,” Thompson said. “And it’s good to be around a head coach who doesn’t mind to kind of get into you. He respects your work, but he also wants to get the most out of you. And he doesn’t believe in ‘you’re past your prime’ or ‘your best years are behind you.’ He believes that you can still be effective at any stage you want — as long as you’re willing to work.”
That part, the commitment to the work, never changes. But a run to the NBA Finals in 2023 was followed up by first-round exits in 2024 and 2025. And last season, when Miami wildly changed its offense but didn’t have anywhere near enough chemistry, the playoffs were missed entirely.
So, change did happen. Norman Powell, Tyler Herro, Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Kel’el Ware — four of last season’s top seven overall scorers for Miami — are gone, with Giannis Antetokounmpo, Tim Hardaway Jr., Bobby Portis and Thompson in their place. And based on early returns, it’s easy to see why Spoelstra is firing people up when he talks about this season.
“We all know what we’re here for,” Spoelstra said. “Everybody understands what they’re signing up for. There’s not any confusion about the agenda. There’s more an excitement about trying to commit to doing something collectively that’s really hard to do and hopefully ends in something so special at the end of the year.
“You want to have that feeling as a coaching staff and as a front office, you also want the players to have the same type of feeling,” he added. “And it’s early right now, but it just feels like those things are aligned.”