If calling yourself an NBA Cup champion wasn’t enough to motivate Miami Heat players, how does half a million dollars sound? Although the NBA Cup (formerly the In-Season Tournament) has its detractors,

The sample size is very small, but Erik Spoelstra might have made the biggest coaching blunder in NBA Cup history on Tuesday. The Heat inexplicably allowed four points in the final 1.8 seconds of overtime on the Pistons' bright blue court,

That last game was particularly interesting because it involved one of the greatest coaches of this generation making an incredibly uncharacteristic mistake at the worst possible time. With the game tied at the end of the extra period, Erik Spoelstra called a timeout … even though the Heat didn’t have any.