Erik Spoelstra remembers exactly where he was when the light came on for him.

In the offseason of 2011, the one in which coaches and players had much more time on their hands due to the NBA lockout, Spoelstra was in search of answers. His first season coaching the LeBron James-Dwyane Wade-Chris Bosh supernova was more difficult than most expected. Sure, the Heat had made the NBA Finals. But they were stunned by the Dallas Mavericks, delaying LeBron’s famous promise of not one, not two, not three …

Spoelstra looked at his team and how they were playing. So much talent, but it wasn’t as connected as it needed to be, particularly on the offensive end.

That’s what brought Spoelstra to Stanford’s Restaurant & Bar in Portland. There waiting for him was R.J. Adelman, the oldest son of longtime NBA coach Rick Adelman, and one of the many quietly influential basketball minds that roam the back halls of arenas across the league.

Were it not for his last name, few of the NBA’s casual fans would have recognized R.J. sitting at the table with one of the league’s rising coaching stars. But those who spent any time around him knew his acumen for the game. And Spoelstra needed some help.

The lunch lasted four hours, with R.J. detailing how his father’s famed corner offense evolved over the years, from Portland to Sacramento to Houston. He went into exhaustive detail on all the possibilities for Spoelstra to deploy James, Wade and Bosh, to empower them the way Rick Adelman had done with Chris Webber and Vlade Divac at one stop and then changed to accommodate Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming at another.

Spoelstra sat at the table scribbling notes furiously as R.J. talked, putting the basketball genius that he never would advertise, and sometimes was reluctant to embrace, on full display. By the time the two were finished, Spoelstra had three-quarters of the notebook filled.

“I couldn’t even keep up with him,” Spoelstra says now. “He was talking about his dad’s offense, how it evolved. What they were looking for. How they drilled it. How you can help your best players be the best players on the court. Everything from A to Z. It was a master’s class in teaching offense.”

Some of the suggestions R.J. provided during that lunch served as the backbone for changes the Heat implemented in the following season, when they won the first of back-to-back championships.

“I had so many ah-ha moments from that lunch from somebody I’d known for years,” Spoelstra says. “He’d say something and put it so simply, I’d be like, ‘Oh jeez. How come I couldn’t even think of that?’”

After that first title, Spoelstra sent Adelman a thank you for helping the Heat realize their full potential. Adelman brushed it off. All he did was take a free lunch. He’d be happy to eat on Spoelstra’s dime again anytime.

It was the kind of humility that earned him so many admirers across the league while serving as a scout for the SuperSonics and Kings, an assistant for the Rockets and the director of player personnel for the Timberwolves, and the kind of aversion to attention that made him so unknown by those outside of it despite his famous last name. It’s also why he is so missed these days.

Adelman was struck and killed in February while crossing the street in downtown Houston. He was just 44 years old and left behind doting parents, five siblings and a group of friends culled from an avant-garde life that was so much more than hoops — law school, caddying for the stars, lobbying.

Nearly seven months after his death, that tight circle who got to see R.J.’s wry grin, got to hear him sneak a zinger out of the side of his mouth, got to sit and talk ball or politics or music are still reeling from the loss of the person they would always turn to in times of trial, the quiet one who always knew just what to say or just what to write to boost their spirits.

“In a weird way I don’t think I have processed it,” said David Adelman, R.J.’s younger brother and an assistant coach with the Denver Nuggets. “For all of us in our family, it’s just a hole. It’s a feel-it-everyday kind of thing. A part of you that you were a part of. That’s what I felt right away and that’s what I feel now. Just a loss of yourself a little bit.”

Spoelstra first got to know R.J. in the 1980s, when both of their fathers worked for the Portland Trail Blazers.

The two built their friendship over hyper-competitive 3-on-3 basketball tournaments and pickleball showdowns at the Adelman family spread in Bull Mountain. R.J. would plan the events meticulously, recruit dozens of participants and cut any one of them down with a sharp one-liner delivered out of the side of his mouth in the heat of the moment.

Spoelstra felt like he had found his Field of Dreams.

“If you build a court, they will come,” he says some three decades later. “And we sure did. They had lights. R.J. used to always say, the evening is the differentiator. Some people can shoot and play pickleball during the day. Not everybody can do that under the lights.”

When the games were done for the day, R.J. would take Erik into his father’s office, a basketball museum where R.J. would help his dad break down game film on VHS. The room was filled with videotapes and scouting reports dating back to Rick Adelman’s time as an assistant under famed Blazers head coach Jack Ramsay.

“That’s when I first was introduced to the level of detail of pro coaching, was from R.J. showing me his dad’s breakdowns from different years and what they were looking for,” Spoelstra says. “I thought that was the most amazing room. His office.”

What few on the outside knew was that R.J. was revered for his basketball intellect and ability to spot talented players who just needed a second chance. Few knew that he could command a room with his comedic timing or that he practiced law in Portland, worked as a lobbyist in New Jersey and caddied for the likes of Joe Pesci and Lawrence Taylor at a private golf club in Arizona before finally deciding to join the family business of basketball.

And that’s just the way R.J. wanted it.

In a league full of movers and shakers, climbers and schemers, R.J. Adelman was the quiet guy in the back of the room who observed the nonsense, ducked the spotlight and cut right to the chase.

“He was guarded in this world, in this toy Mattel world in the NBA. That’s why he was good at it,” David Adelman said. “He only trusted real people. That’s why he always did well in situations where I just think he felt comfortable people that he knew were 100 percent for the right things and the right reasons. He didn’t have a lot of time for people who were wheelin’ and dealin’. That just wasn’t who he was. He surrounded himself with people that were real.”

R.J. Adelman and his sister, Kathy Naro. (Photo provided by Kathy Naro)

Before he was a scout or an executive or a lawyer, R.J. was a baller. He played at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and won an NAIA Division-II national championship as a sophomore in 1993.

Cavan Scanlan was a year behind R.J., but the two quickly bonded over basketball and Adelman’s varied interests off the court. And it didn’t take long for Scanlan to learn that R.J. was the guy he wanted to partner with during free throw shooting drills at practice.

“He could direct a ball to where he wanted it,” Scanlan says. “If I was tired, I could stand there and not even have to touch the ball because he could shoot a free throw and it would hit the back of the rim and take two bounces right back to him.

“He’d just say, ‘Where do you want it?’”

He also saw how R.J. tailored his interactions to the personalities he engaged with at the time, the same way he and his father would make adjustments to the offense they ran to cater to the strengths of individual players.

“A joke on me would be crass. But to my other teammate he would be tasteful,” Scanlan said. “He was masterful at that. Ultimately putting people at ease with his nature. He was a gem like that.”

Willamette University honored R.J. Adelman after his death when the school celebrated the 25th anniversary of its only national championship.

The jabs would come so quickly and were so subtle, especially on the home court in Bull Mountain.

“If you weren’t paying attention, it would go right over your head,” Spoelstra said. “Usually for me, it would be about 30 seconds later, I would be walking away or talking to somebody else and I would think back to what he just said and I would start laughing.”

“Whether you’re playing, that moment or a minute later, the opportunity to come back is gone,” Scanlan said. “You can’t retort then. The packaging of the trash talk where it was coded, that was one of his tricks.”

It was classic Rick Adelman, a wit that was drier than Sauvignon Blanc and a tongue sharper than a back cut in his father’s famed corner offense. R.J. also inherited, or absorbed, his father’s acumen for the game.

When Willamette took a timeout during games, Scanlan would see coach Gordie James find R.J. in the huddle and ask, “What do you think?”

“His I.Q. was off the charts,” Scanlan said. “Even then, it was obvious this guy could be a head coach right now. He was that good and that advanced.”

“The way he thought was different than most people,” Spoelstra said. “It allowed him to think in different layers and depth to something that most of us would just look at on the surface.”

As naturally as the game seemed to come to him, R.J. took the path of greater resistance to get to the NBA. His interest in politics and an instinct to champion for the underdog led him to law school at the University of Oregon and sent him on a series of adventures on both coasts.

“He didn’t want at first to be the typical coach’s son,” said Kathy Naro, the oldest of the six Adelman children. “He wanted to do things himself and find his way. He’s very smart. Always was. He had a real soft spot for the underdog and that drove him to law. He loved people. Caddying and traveling, he enjoyed meeting different people from different parts of the country.”

But he never strayed too far from the game. When his father was coaching the Kings in a playoff series against the Utah Jazz in 1999, R.J. decided to drive from his lobbyist job in New Jersey to Salt Lake City.

“He could’ve flown,” David said. “He just wanted to see Nebraska. He hadn’t seen Iowa. That’s just who he was. It was the next experience, the next thing, the next thing.”

Eventually, he joined up with Rick in the NBA and put all of his experiences and travels to good use. He had a special affinity for guys like Bonzi Wells and Ron Artest, players who had bounced around thanks to their reputations or actions. It’s what his dad was known for as well.

“He loved Bonzi and he loved Ron and loved these guys that people would say, ‘How do you sign this guy? How do you handle this guy?’” David said. “Well, maybe you handle them because you actually care about them and get to know them and find out why things went bad and why things could go good. You have to give people a chance.”

The last NBA stop for Rick and R.J. came in Minnesota in 2011, when Rick was hired to coach a downtrodden franchise. David came on as an assistant and R.J. was in the front office. With Ricky Rubio flinging passes as a rookie and Kevin Love taking his game to another level, there were some bright moments early in their first season together.

“Especially now, I don’t know if we all realize how special that time was now that he’s gone,” Kathy said. “I think David and my dad and R.J. are all so different personality-wise. Even their gifts basketball-wise. Putting all those together was pretty special. I think it’s a time that we will continue to value that much more now that he’s no longer with us.”

No one enjoyed the situation more than David, who was eight years younger than R.J. and grew up in awe of his big brother’s adventurousness and ability to see the game. He was well aware of the whispers of nepotism that floated through the halls of Target Center when all three first joined the organization.

“I won’t say that we earned those rights to have those opportunities, but of all people to earn the right to evaluate players, people, personas, how they fit into a group of people, my brother was built to do that,” David says, choking back tears. “He was good at it.”

Those who knew him best say R.J. had another talent that rivaled anything he accomplished in the NBA. Whenever his family or friends were in need of a boost or going through a struggle, they would receive a text message or a handwritten note from R.J. delivering just the right message.

“R.J. would just know the perfect time to send a text when I needed it,” Spoelstra said. “Only R.J. had that type of intuition. It would be either after we were struggling with some words of encouragement or when things were going well that he noticed how we were playing.

“When you get those kinds of texts from a guy like R.J., they’re like gold.”

Kathy still laughs when talking about the random music videos from their childhood that would sporadically pop into her phone and bring a smile to her face. No message. No explanation. Just something silly R.J. knew would brighten her day.

She recently got back into coaching high school girls after a hiatus and remembers grappling with a few things in the early days of her return. Then one day an exhaustive email came in from her brother, who had gone over video of his sister’s team and offered thoughts on how she could best utilize the talents at her disposal.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reread that letter,” she says. “It came to me at a perfect time when I needed it. When he passed away, it’s something that I really hold onto.”

Scanlan’s father passed away in February as well, five days before R.J.’s accident. As he sat in the hospital room and watched his dad take his last breaths, he was looking for a place to turn.

“He was the first guy I called,” Scanlan said. “We didn’t have to talk long. It was one of those that I just felt better after 10 minutes. I called him. And then I called my brother and my sister. I don’t know why. I was just sitting there. It was more of a reaction, a subconscious move on my part. Then I could do the other calls.”

At the time of his death, R.J. was living in Houston and contemplating whether he wanted to continue in basketball or go back into law. He was crossing the street downtown around noon on Feb. 2 when a car driven by an 80-year-old woman struck him. He died at the hospital a few hours later.

R.J. had dealt with some alcohol issues, but David Adelman says police told the family there was no alcohol in his system at the time of the accident. The woman was not charged in what appears to be a freak accident.

“I think we’re all still broken up,” Kathy said. “Still, at times, I’m about to call him. I’ll be doing something and say, ‘I should call R.J.’ And then it will hit me that I can’t call him. It’s an ongoing process. I don’t think we’ve figured it out.”

“I loved R.J. I love their family,” Spoelstra said. “Your mind can’t accept when a good man goes too early.”

Still stinging from his father’s death, Scanlan was at home in Hawaii when he got the call from a former teammate that R.J. had been killed. He collapsed on the front yard as his children came out to check on him.

Scanlan insists he’s not prone to spiritual visions. But somehow as he searched for the strength to start making calls to friends to pass along the news, he swears he could see R.J. “looking at me in his baggy, long-sleeve Adidas Timberwolves shirt.”

R.J. never wanted anyone to make a fuss over him when he was alive. And that damn sure wasn’t going to change now.

“In that moment, I could see him,” Scanlan said. “I could feel him. I could hear him saying, ‘Get yourself together.’

“In that moment, I thought frickin’ R.J. man. You’ve been gone 24 hours and you’re already helping me out. It was devastating losing him so quickly.”

In the absence of answers, all the Adelmans can do is be thankful that R.J. lived the life he wanted to live, however short it may have been.

“He lived life in a vagabond way,” David says. “I think people like him that are that into the worldly view and wanted to experience as much as possible, he didn’t say it, he did it. That’s why his friends loved him. He was the guy that you told stories about. What’s he doing now? There was that feeling to him.”