Spoelstra made his points in a pair of books he wrote.Cathy Cheney
Jon Spoelstra knows how to spot and develop executive talent. Consider that when he was president of the New Jersey Nets, he hired and then mentored some of today’s top industry executives.
During the mid-1990s, Scott O’Neil, now CEO of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment; Howie Nuchow, co-head of CAA Sports; Brett Yormark, co-CEO of Roc Nation; and Steve DeLay, owner of the Macon Bacon minor league franchise, all worked at the same time under Spoelstra and the Nets.
All point to Spoelstra’s mentorship as a primary reason for their success. Here are their reflections on Spoelstra’s impact on them and the industry.
■ Howie Nuchow: “You learned from watching him take risks. When you are 22 or 23, and you have all this ambition, you’d watch him change the rules, and it was empowering. A lot of us found empowerment in his challenging authority, thinking big and encouraging that to other people. By the time you were managing people, you would encourage that, too. He used to take us out for dinner. It was amazing to spend time with the team president. We’d get chicken wings and beer, and we’d sit and talk. He’d give us a business book every week. If you didn’t read the book, you had to pay for the meal.”
■ Scott O’Neil: “He promoted me to sell sponsorships at age 23 after I fixed the copier machine on a Saturday. He took chances, and he was smart and he loved talent and didn’t care what size or shape it came in. He was a new-age leader in a business that was begging for it. He had such an impact on how I saw culture. The first thing he did was hire ticket sellers. We had 40; most teams had five. This was in 1992. There wasn’t much of a sports marketing team business back then. It was a bunch of young people just getting after it.”
■ Steve DeLay: “One of the things that was great was that he’d put pressure on you to deliver, but he’d take you under his wing to help you. One day he was standing next to one of our owners and he called me over and said to go pitch him because he wanted to understand what we do when we call on businesses. I was 23, but it was because he had confidence in us. If he trusted us, he was comfortable putting us on the spot.”
■ Brett Yormark: “Jon was ahead of his time; he was an innovator and a creator. He always went against the grain in a positive way to do things differently. He was a master at selling things to people that they didn’t want to buy. Jon, to some people, could come across as somewhat aloof but when you got to know him and he liked you, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for you. He didn’t stay in one place too long. He would come in and be a change agent and move on.”
