Pickleball tournaments and 3-on-3 basketball showdowns were the main events at the Adelman household. It was a gathering place for spirited competition and camaraderie among Portland Trail Blazer families during the 1980s and ‘90s, when Rick Adelman was still in the early stages of a Hall-of-Fame coaching career.
Erik Spoelstra’s fondest memories, though, are the tours he took of Rick’s home office after everyone tired of pickleball and finished eating lunch.
Stacks of VHS tapes and scouting reports filled the room, documents of a life in basketball. Spoelstra, whose dad worked for the Blazers, held deep admiration for Rick and always wanted to see the latest film he was studying. The Adelman kids would take Spoelstra into the office and show him around. “One way or another,” he says, “I was always over there.”
It turned out there were two future NBA head coaches in the room, a decade apart in age.
Spoelstra, 55, is the longest-tenured active coach in the league today, a three-time champion with the Miami Heat and the newly appointed head coach of Team USA ahead of the 2028 Olympics. He’s also one of the many notable characters whom David Adelman encountered while growing up in a family of basketball intellectuals.
Adelman, 44, has already been faced with an unreasonable number of dilemmas in his first year as an NBA head coach in Denver. As he continues to steer the Nuggets through a series of injuries highlighted by Nikola Jokic’s hyperextended knee, his tactical acumen and troubleshooting ability are being challenged more than ever. Spoelstra is one of his most steadfast believers, dating back to those pickleball parties.
Head coach David Adelman of the Denver Nuggets talks to Nikola Jokic (15) during the fourth quarter of the Nuggets’ 126-115 win over the Orlando Magic at Ball Arena in Denver, Colorado on Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)Adelman was always the young savant in those visits to Rick’s office.
“David was just a little kid, and he could explain what was happening on tape, like in the Finals and things like that,” Spoelstra told The Denver Post. “I would be like, ‘Oh, what are they working on?’ He’d go, ‘Oh, watch this edit.’ He would pull the edit. I was still a fan, knowing I wanted to get into coaching. David just knew he was going to get into coaching, even when he was 10, 12 years old.”
As Spoelstra transitioned from playing to coaching and eventually joined Miami as an assistant in 1997, he remained friends with David’s older siblings and even consulted R.J. Adelman about offensive strategy from time to time before R.J. died in 2018. The entire family, Spoelstra says, has “meant the world to me. I’ve said it many times, but Rick was my role model. That’s why I got into coaching.”
Though David was much younger, Spoelstra kept tabs on him as well. They went to the same Portland-area high school, where David won a state championship alongside future NBA player and current Golden State Warriors general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. Spoelstra continued to be struck by how naturally Adelman could think through the game over the years.
“I’d go to lunch with (his sister) Kathy, and David was in high school,” Spoelstra told The Post. “And usually the thoughts of a high school player are like, ‘All right, how am I fitting in? How am I gonna score? How am I gonna earn this role on this team?’ His view was always about what scheme the coach was doing that he thought was really good; how they were going to beat certain teams in the league; how certain players were going to be really successful because X, Y or Z.
“I just thought it was very deep-level thinking. I certainly did not think like that as a high school player.”
Head coach Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat works during the fourth quarter of the Denver Nuggets’ 122-112 win at Ball Arena in Denver on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)Spoelstra settled in as Pat Riley’s protege in Miami, and eventually, as his successor. He has coached the Heat to six NBA Finals appearances in his tenure since 2008, including an underdog run as the East’s No. 8 seed in 2023. The Nuggets finally defeated his squad, with Adelman serving as lead assistant and offensive coordinator on the other sideline.
By then, he and Spoelstra had gotten to know each other more as adults. They would get together for coffee or dinner in Las Vegas during the annual NBA Summer League. They “hung out for the whole week,” Spoelstra said, when they were on the same Basketball Without Borders trip to South Africa in 2017. Spoelstra and then-Nuggets coach Michael Malone were the head coaches in an NBA Africa game.
Adelman joined Malone’s staff that same offseason after stints with Minnesota and Orlando. He’s been in Denver ever since, establishing his reputation as an assistant and going through multiple head coaching interviews in recent years before eventually replacing Malone.
His Nuggets and Spoelstra’s Heat split their first two head-to-head matchups this season, though Jokic went down with his injury in a close game that Denver eventually lost in Miami this week.
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The respect runs both ways. Spoelstra, forever a Rick Adelman disciple even after decades in Miami, can credit himself as one of the first people outside the family who recognized where David was headed.
“At a young age, we all just felt David would be the best of all of us,” he said. “He had a different level of maturity and understanding of the game. … David was dissecting it at a deeper level. And wherever Rick went, David was always at his side. So he’s been ready for this opportunity for a long time. I think he has a great feel for people, and the basketball acumen speaks for itself.”
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