Miami ready to turn up heat in bid for title

1.792607-1723918229 — Toronto Raptors’ DeMar DeRozan goes up for a slam dunk with teammate Joey Dorsey as Miami Heat’s Zydrunas Ilgauskas (left) and Joel Anthony look on during the first half in Toronto on Wednesday. Image Credit: Reuters

Toronto: The Miami Heat completed their regular season with a confident 97-79 win over the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday, the star-studded line-up now able to shift their focus to a tilt at the NBA championship. Having already locked up the second seed in the East and a first round match-up with the Philadelphia 76ers, the Heat rested All-Star trio LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh for the regular season finale and still ran out comfortable winners.

After enduring a campaign of unrelenting scrutiny, the Heat now face a completely new set of questions. The spotlight becoming brighter and the attention more intense.

The Heat have had 82 games to learn to play together and their first round series against the energetic 76ers should reveal if those lessons have sunk in.

"I think we have squeezed everything you possibly could out of the regular season and I think it has prepared us for the post-season," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra told reporters. "What I've been talking about the last few weeks are habits. If you haven't developed habits over the five months of the regular season and been building up resiliency and the resolve to get you through tough time; you're not going to try to do it in a day and a half."

From the day in July when ‘King James' jilted the Cleveland Cavaliers announcing he was taking his talents to South Beach to form an NBA super team with Bosh and Wade, Miami has been planning a championship parade. A regular season record of 58-24 was the first step towards their objective but now the climb becomes steeper with four testing best-of-seven series needing to be navigated to the summit.

"Our objective is winning, you can see it by our actions and the Big Three's actions," Heat centre Jamaal Magloire told reporters.

Byrant fined $100,000

Los Angeles: Lakers guard Kobe Bryant was fined $100,000 (Dh367,000) by the NBA on Wednesday for comments directed at a referee during a recent game that have been strongly criticised by leading gay rights groups.

Television cameras caught the 13-times All-Star shouting an anti-gay slur at the referee shortly after he was called for a technical foul during Tuesday's game against San Antonio. The league said the comments by Bryant, one of the NBA's biggest names, were offensive and inexcusable. "While I'm fully aware that basketball is an emotional game, such a distasteful term should never be tolerated," NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a statement.

"Kobe and everyone associated with the NBA know that insensitive or derogatory comments are not acceptable and have no place in our game or society."

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