MIAMI Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra’s ex-wife has candidly spoken out about her life following divorce.
Nikki Spoelstra opened up about her “next phase as a single mom in recovery.”
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In an interview with the Miami Herald, Spoelstra told all about her DUI arrest, alcoholism, and her divorce.
“People are very quick to label women gold diggers,” she said.
“Like, ‘Oh, if she is with a successful person, she must be in it for the money.
“Do you really think that’s all a husband brings to the table? In the end, no one really knows what happened.”
Erik Spoelstra signed an eight-year, $120 million contract extension with Miami weeks after announcing his divorce from Nikki.
Nikki faced ridicule online after the extension was signed, with fans saying she “fumbled the bag.”
She spoke out about those online trolls at the time and begged people to “be nicer.”
Nikki was married to Spoelstra for seven years and the former couple share three children together.
They are parents to sons Santiago, 6, and Dante, 4, and daughter, Ruby, 2.
In the interview, Nikki also opened up about her DUI arrest before she started dating Spoelstra.
“That mugshot was like my coming out in Miami society, and I remember feeling so much shame and embarrassment,” she said.
“This is a cruel, cruel world I’m walking into.”
She got help for her drinking problem around the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I was newly sober. I was married to a public figure, and I was having a very real reckoning with my identity and who I was becoming and what I wanted as a grown woman and mother,” Nikki said.
“I started to have these conversations with people who I thought were really celebrating their own sense of deep knowing and experts in different industries.
New rights deal
The NBA signed an 11-year deal with three networks for the league’s rights from the 2025-26 season.
And there will be no games on TNT for the first time since the network launched in 1988.
The Walt Disney Company will continue to show the league with 80 regular-season games across ESPN and ABC.
They will also show around 18 playoff games from the first and second round, a Conference Finals series for 10 of the 11 years, and remain the home of the NBA Finals.
NBC will return as an NBA broadcaster for the first time since 2002.
The network will show up to 100 games per season across it’s channels and Peacock streaming service.
It will also be the home of NBA All-Star and show approximately 28 playoff games from the first and second round.
NBC will show one Conference Finals Series for six of the 11 years, rotating with new broadcaster Amazon Prime.
Amazon will show 66 NBA regular-season games including one on Black Friday.
The streaming service is also the home of the latter stages of the NBA Cup and the entire Play-In Tournament.
Prime will also broadcast around one third of the playoff games in the first and second round.
“The response was really positive.”
Nikki is very open about her sobriety and her journey through recovery on the Becoming: HER podcast.
She decided to be open and expose her past to call herself out on her “bulls***.”
“I was like, OK, I’m deeply ashamed of my history with alcohol and the way I’ve disappointed myself and others. So instead of allowing this to be hung over my head, I’m gonna start talking about it,” Nikki said.
“Then I found that in talking about it, I was able to not just heal, but heal other people, and help them feel less alone.”
