Back to the grind Dwyane Wade returns to familiar Heat training camp
BOCA RATON — This is how comfortable Dwyane Wade felt being back at Miami Heat camp.
“I can run this camp,” he said as the Heat opened five days of work at Florida Atlantic University. “If Coach wants to go back to the hotel, I can run it.”
Erik Spoelstra decided to stay. He also said the experience being back alongside Wade for training camp felt decidedly familiar.
“It actually felt like [it was] last year, but it wasn’t,” Spoelstra said of his previous training camp guiding the franchise icon. “It’s amazing how these years just blend and time just goes so fast, just slips through your hands. So I’m grateful that we have him around again.
“And he’s already showing his value. Forget about the talent. He’s in shape, so he’s able to show that. The leadership and the voice, all of his experience that he’s able to help our team out with is priceless.”
Having spent 2016 training camp with the Chicago Bulls and last year’s camp with the Cleveland Cavaliers, Wade said more than the weather made him realize he wasn’t in the Midwest anymore.
“Miami Heat, it’s just different,” the franchise’s all-time leading scorer said. “It’s just different. I enjoyed the other camps, but this one is a lot different — the intensity, early on the attention to detail. This is different.
“The other camps were more basketball playing, just more: get out there, get up and down, scrimmaging. We’re more structured early on. So, just a little different.”
This was a camp that Wade wasn’t sure he would be attending until a week ago. That had him going through the offseason
“It’s amazing how these years just blend and time just goes so fast, just slips through your hands.”
Erik Spoelstra, Heat coach
in a different mode than after his first 14 NBA seasons.
“Well, there definitely were times where I didn’t want to get up and I just didn’t,” he said of a summer that had him in South Florida, Chicago, California, China and Europe. “There were times where I wasn’t in this mindset that I’m in today. But I eventually got there.
“I’ve still got a ways to go, to get to where I want to get to. But I did enough to make sure my body was strong enough. I’m in good enough shape, but I’ve got to get in better shape.”
Even without that hiatus of uncertainty, training camp is naturally different at 36.
“I read my body. Today was a good day one,” he said. “My plan is on doing as much as my body allows me to do and hopefully I’ve done enough this summer where I continue to push it to the edge but don’t go over.”
Before Wade left for his hometown Bulls in 2016 free agency, before he reunited with Heat championship teammate LeBron James in Cleveland for the first half of the season, he had served as de facto coach during such drills. That again was the case Tuesday.
But there was one difference from the last time he was at Heat camp.
“I was like, ‘They got a DJ up here?’ ” he said of the booth set up along the baseline, as it was last year during camp. “So keeping it light for the first day.”
As for his camp rhythm, that still was a bit off. He was up at 5 a.m. for the 10 a.m. session.
“I just do what my body tells me to do,” he said. “If my body tells me to get up, then I’m up and I figure out things to do. So I was up at 5, and I was figuring out things to do.”
Wade rejoined the Heat at February’s trading deadline, helping lead the team to what proved to be an uneven five-game first-round playoff demise against the Philadelphia 76ers.
“With the intensity that we got to bring each day, we also got to bring our minds,” he said, citing a mental letdown in that series. “Some of the things we could have done better in the playoffs.”