National Basketball Association

Spoelstra's message to Heat rarely varies

Published Mar. 26, 2011 7:08 p.m. ET

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Trust. Effort. Process. Sacrifice. Consistency.

Those are Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra's real starting five.

Not players, but buzzwords - the foundation of the message he's been trying to instill within the Heat for the past six months, and they'll stay in his vocabulary rotation all the way through the season's final buzzer. It's a delicate balancing act for coaches, trying to stay on message with a team while not appearing to be saying the same thing day after day after day.

Ask the Heat, and they say Spoelstra is finding a way to avoid that problem.

''He kind of changes it up,'' Heat forward LeBron James said. ''You don't want to try to say the same thing over and over and over. That's when it kind of just drowns out guys. Spo kind of keeps it fresh. He's young and hip enough to know what's fresh, so he gets his point across, but he changes it up a lot for us.''

Clearly, the Heat are listening to pretty much whatever it is Spoelstra is saying.

Friday night's 111-99 win over Philadelphia got Miami to the 50-victory mark for the season, the first time the Heat have been there since the championship campaign five years ago. Miami is within a half-game of Boston for the No. 2 spot in the Eastern Conference and has won seven of its last eight games since dropping five in a row.

The buzzwords are buzzing right now.

''I don't get tired of it and I know that's the most important thing for this team,'' Spoelstra said Saturday. ''When you do three press conferences a day, you guys probably get tired of it. But that is the message. We have to stick to our process.''

And Spoelstra does that, almost without fail.

A year ago, it was ''purity,'' usually in reference to giving effort. This season for the Heat started with ''sacrifice,'' especially after James, Wade, Bosh, Udonis Haslem, Mike Miller and others all agreed to take less money than they could have gotten elsewhere to fit into Miami's salary structure. For a while, Spoelstra took to calling the Heat a ''Band of Brothers,'' which even was the theme for his Christmas gifts to players - and a phrase he used again Saturday. With the playoffs looming, Spoelstra can work ''consistency'' into nearly any sentence these days as well.

''Uh, ummm, who said it was fresh? Coaches are repetitive,'' Wade said, breaking into a sly grin. ''That's what they do. They say it enough to where it sticks. If it don't stick the first, second or third time, he's going to keep saying it until it sticks. So when he comes with something, when he wants us to focus on something, whether we're losing or winning, that's what we're focused on.''

James has played for a variety of coaches with a variety of styles, from Paul Silas to Mike Brown in Cleveland, Larry Brown and Mike Krzyzewski with the U.S. Olympic teams, and now Spoelstra in Miami.

The methodolgy tends to change from guy to guy, but the points typically remain the same, said the NBA's two-time reigning MVP. And whatever it is that Spoelstra's selling to the Heat, James says he's buying.

''We're growing together with him every day,'' James said.

Just about any coach in any sport will wrestle with this question: How do you stay on point without becoming a bore? It's certainly not exclusive to Spoelstra, not by a long shot.

Spoelstra simply doesn't worry about it. It's his process.

''We still have room for improvement,'' Spoelstra said. ''We are unique, we feel, to other teams. We still don't know necessarily what our ceiling is and we've got to keep on striving for that. Part of that is consistency. Part of that is getting more players involved, aggressive and confident.''

He's expressed all those sentiments before at times this season. They seem to be working.