When it comes to the rotation, Erik Spoelstra has no room for hurt feelings

The Heat need to make a run. With only 21 games left in the season, Miami can’t risk what happened last season. They need to control their fate and the best way to do that will be to move up in the standings.

Heat head coach, Erik Spoelstra is buckling down for this run and as Ira Winderman reported for the Sun Sentinel, when it comes to the rotation he has no room for hurt feelings. I mean let’s face it, that wouldn’t be part of the culture they’ve built in Miami.

Spoelstra explains:

“To accomplish what we want to accomplish, we need contributions from many people. And if you want to be a great team, you have to have guys willing to sacrifice.

“Does that make it easy? No. But we have the right kind of guys that have the right character and understand that concept, that team chemistry matters, and filling a role and also being a supportive teammate and enjoying someone else’s success.”

“I want to be mindful and empathetic to each player and their ambition and how they want to help and to contribute to this team,” he said. “But as we say here all the time, ‘The main thing is the main thing.’ There’s not a whole lot of time to just focus on trying to keep people happy. That’s not what this is about.

”This is about — contribute whatever your role may be, and that might be not be in concrete right now. We have to move, it’s time. I mentioned that before — there’s no time to mess around or walk on eggshells and people will be bent out of shape about minutes. No, there’s no time for that right now.”

Spoelstra is right. The Heat bench is very deep and as we saw last night, they have the ability to bring people in to contribute right away (i.e Rodney McGruder three pointer, and Kelly Olynyk’s energy boost). With the bumps and bruises the Heat will no doubt suffer on the way to the postseason, this mix and match rotation will become a necessity.

It will be very interesting to see how Spoelstra manages things dependent on the different matchups going forward.