Players not surprised by Heat’s rise

5-game homestand is chance to make big move in playoffff race.

INDIANAPOLIS — With 15 regular-season games remaining, the Heat are just a half game out of the Eastern Conference’s fifinal playoffff spot.

They aren’t surprised to fifind themselves in the middle of the playoffff race this late in the season. Ask Miami’s players and they will tell you this is what they expected ... even when the team was 11-30.

“It’s not really a surprise to us,” guard Tyler Johnson said. “It was a surprise that we were sitting at 11-30. Obviously, we didn’t know how good of a team we could be until we started playing the way we have. But coming out of training camp, we thought we were going to have a really good team.”

So the Heat, who fell to the Indiana Pacers 102-98 Sunday night, think their 11-30 start was more surprising than their 21-5 run since that low point?

“I agree with him 100 percent,” Wayne Ellington said when told of Johnson’s comment. “We had a great training camp, a great preseason, and then we come into the season and it’s not really going the way we thought it would. But we knew the type of team we were capable of being. We didn’t realize it would take that much time to fifigure it out and start playing the way we knew that we were capable of.

“But this is the NBA. There were a lot of new faces, we were injury plagued, but we never made an excuse. I think that was the key. We never made