MANILA, Philippine – Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra will have a chance to make basketball history on Friday when his team takes on the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on their homecourt at the American Airlines Arena.
If the Heat win Game 5, they will be crowned NBA champions and Spoelstra will be the first Filipino-American coach to steer his squad to a title in any professional sport in the United States.
Spoelstra’s mother, Elisa Celino, is from San Pablo, Laguna. His Dutch-Irish-American father, Jon Spoelstra, worked as an executive with various NBA teams.
After four years as a starting guard at the University of Portland, Spoelstra briefly considered playing for the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) in 1992.
In a story by Rafe Bartholomew on Grantland, it was revealed that Spoelstra’s relatives in Laguna sent him videos of local playoff games, and that Toronto Raptors scout Jim Kelly tried to arrange for him to play in Manila.
Kelly had worked as a consultant for PBA teams in Manila and believed Spoelstra could have succeeded as a player in the PBA.
“He was multi-positional. Over there (in the PBA), he could have even been a big guy. But more than that, he was a thinking-man’s player,” said Kelly. “Probably big on heart, a little bit less on skill, and that’s why he’s a good coach.”
But Spoelstra would never play in the PBA; instead, he played for a team in Germany before getting hired as a video coordinator by the Miami Heat in 1995.
Spoelstra has visited the Philippines for the past three summers to conduct basketball clinics. In the Grantland story, Spoelstra reportedly promised that if the Heat win a title, he will bring the Larry O’Brien trophy to the Philippines.
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