James, Heat Turn Attention Toward East Finals at BetLM

James, Heat Turn Attention Toward East Finals

MIAMI (NBA/Newsfeed) – LeBron James shook a few hands, slapped a few fives, gave a few hugs.

That was the extent of his cel­e­brat­ing after the Miami Heat ousted the Indi­ana Pacers.

A return to the East­ern Con­fer­ence finals – no small achieve­ment by any mea­sure – is nice, though it’s far from the oft-stated goal for the reign­ing NBA MVP and the Heat. They’ll host Game 1 of the East title series on Mon­day night against either Philadel­phia or Boston, both of those teams hav­ing been ousted from last year’s play­offs by Miami in five games.

“You can’t just show up, no mat­ter who you’re play­ing against,” James said Sat­ur­day, when the Heat resumed prac­tice after tak­ing one day off to rest up and recover from a grind against Indi­ana. “We have to pre­pare the same way we’ve done the first two rounds – and even pre­pare our­selves even more. As the rounds go, the com­pe­ti­tion grows, so we look for­ward to the challenge.”

The way James sees it, there’s not a lot of rea­son for cel­e­bra­tion yet. After all, he’s not wear­ing the let­ters VIII across his upper teeth.

Over the past cou­ple sea­sons, James has worn mouth­guards with fangs, oth­ers with the Heat logo, and some with no adorn­ments what­so­ever. For these play­offs, he’s bro­ken out some­thing new: A mouth­guard embossed “XVI.”

It doesn’t take much to deci­pher what those Roman numer­als are sup­posed to sig­nify. It’s 16, the num­ber of wins that the Heat would need to cap­ture the NBA cham­pi­onship. Miami has the first eight of those out of the way, but in this all-or-nothing sea­son for the Heat, that’s far from enough to sat­isfy any­one. Beat­ing New York brought one or two quick moments of excite­ment, as did top­ping Indi­ana, but nei­ther pro­vided the ulti­mate moment.

“The first year in Cleve­land, when we beat Wash­ing­ton in that first-round series, it was an achieve­ment for not only myself and my team­mates but for our fran­chise, which hadn’t been to the play­offs in a long time,” James said. “Those days are over. My aspi­ra­tion is to go win a cham­pi­onship now. So those days are over.”

They’ve been over for a while, of course. And as if any­one needed any reminder of the goal, James started wear­ing the “XVI” mouth­guard. The idea came from Mike Man­cias, a trainer who has worked with James for years, first in Cleve­land and for the past two sea­sons with the Heat.

“We always look for inspi­ra­tion through­out the play­offs and through­out the sea­son to just kind of get me going,” James said. “He knows that I’m a big Glad­i­a­tor fan, of course Max­imus, the Roman numer­als, all that stuff. So that’s where the inspi­ra­tion came from. Some­times I say I want some­thing, some­times Mike sur­prises me with a lot of it. I like that. I like the inspiration.”

Of course, the main source of inspi­ra­tion remains the cham­pi­onship trophy.

Sat­ur­day was essen­tially a tuneup day for the Heat, given that they couldn’t exactly plan for an oppo­nent because Game 7 of the Celtics-76ers series was still hours from tip-off.

Miami prac­ticed again with­out All-Star for­ward Chris Bosh, who remains side­lined indef­i­nitely because of a lower abdom­i­nal strain that kept him out of the final five games of the Indi­ana series. Bosh has been able to resume some light con­di­tion­ing work, but his return to the court hardly sounds imminent.

“For me, it’s my respon­si­bil­ity right now to pre­pare this team with­out him,” Heat coach Erik Spoel­stra said. “If and when it gets to a point where he starts to emerge into the pic­ture, we would gladly deal with that, because we’re a more dan­ger­ous offen­sive team, a more dan­ger­ous defen­sive team when he’s in the mix. But for our men­tal state of health, I love you Chris, but our prepa­ra­tion is with­out him.”

With­out Bosh, James and Dwyane Wade pre­dictably were asked to do more, and responded.

Wade scored 99 points in the final three games of the Pac­ers series – all Miami wins – while James scored 98 points in those games. James fin­ished the six games against the Pac­ers with 65 rebounds, his most ever in a post­sea­son series, top­ping the 60 he grabbed in a seven-game matchup with Detroit in 2006. And Spoel­stra isn’t shy about sug­gest­ing that the Heat need Wade and James to stay at that level to keep win­ning, say­ing Sat­ur­day what hap­pened in the last three games against Indi­ana “has to be the norm.”

Wade and James indi­cated they wel­comed that.

“You pre­pare to go out there and try to play at a high level,” James said. “Does it always hap­pen that way? It doesn’t. Some­times the ball just doesn’t go in for you. We’re not just shoot­ing all layups. We’re also mak­ing jumpers and floaters and things of that nature. He said the right thing. He said the right thing to just keep us on our toes and let us know we can’t have a relaxed moment.”

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more NBA news see: James, Heat turn atten­tion toward East Finals.

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