Haslem in his head
MIAMI — The official word — or at least what supposedly was the official word — came 90 minutes before tipoff: Tyler Johnson would not play because of the strained left shoulder that had kept him out the previous night in Toronto.
All the while, Johnson, who has taken ample blows to his head over his four seasons with the Miami Heat, kept hearing voices — actually one particular voice.
So as the minutes ticked down toward what would turn into Wednesday night’s 114-106 victory over the Indiana Pacers at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, Johnson approached coach Erik Spoelstra.
“Tyler came into my office,” Spoelstra said, “and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to give it a shot. Five minutes, if I can help you at the end of the quarter.’ I looked at him like he was crazy. So I called up Jay [Sabol, the team’s trainer] and he said it’s really up to him, just play it by ear.”
Johnson would wind up playing 30 minutes, 42 seconds, score 15 points, convert three 3-pointers, grab five rebounds.
All because of the respect held for tri-captain Udonis Haslem, the otherwise silent partner to what now stands as a six-game Heat winning streak going into a much-needed three-day break.
“When I got here,” Johnson after the victory, “UD was just whispering in my ear, ‘If you can just suit up and give us four, five minutes, plug minutes ... ‘ My plan wasn’t to go in and play like I did. It was just go in and fill the void.”
It is that fellowship that Johnson did not want to deny, not with teammate James Johnson serving a onegame suspension for turning to his mixed martial arts background a night earlier in Toronto, not with Dion Waiters, Justise Winslow, Rodney McGruder and Okaro White already out.
“They just gave me some pills to try and relax it, try and relax the muscles that kind of tighten up,” Tyler Johnson said of what turned out to be a pinched nerve in his neck. “I still can’t really turn my head. It’s still hard to turn my head. But we got it to somewhere where it was manageable, the pain, the movement and being able to at least lift my shoulder up, which to me was the most important part.” And lift his team up. “That’s why you love Tyler Johnson so much,” Spoelstra said. “At the walkthrough he still was jammed up in his neck.”
Spoelstra said the plan was far less extensive than the role turned out to be, with Johnson not only playing to the finish, but playing all but one second of the fourth quarter, scoring 10 of his points in the period.
“I went with the Mike Miller role, just playing him to the end of the quarter, just get us to the end of the quarter,” Spoelstra said of utilizing Johnson off the bench for the first time in Johnson’s last 11 appearances. “And he did a couple of good things in that first quarter and I went to take him out and he said, ‘What, are you crazy?’ So we let him roll.
“A winning locker room can cure a lot of different things. So we have thankfully some time before the next game. The shoulder feels fine now. Now it’s all in his neck.”
With a victory the result — Haslem was in his head.
“We found out it was a nerve thing and everything was occurring from my neck,” he said. “That was causing it to go into my shoulder. So we started working on different parts of my neck to try to get some of that shoulder pain to get relieved.
“Luckily, we have a few days here to try and figure it out. All I can do to get that, the muscles or whatever it is, to calm down. But these three days are going to be critical.” all because