The 36-year-old Dwyane Wade is an early riser, at least for Day 1 of training camp.
Wade woke up at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, five hours before the 10 a.m. start of practice at FAU. It wasn’t part of the plan, just the time his body was ready to wake up.
“I don’t even know what my routine is,” Wade said following his first training camp practice with the Heat since 2015. “It varies. It’s a lot of things you try to do, so I just do what my body tells me to. If my body tells me to get up then I’m up and I just figure out things to do. So I was up at five and I was figuring out things to do.”
Once practice started, though, Wade knew exactly what to do entering his 14th Miami Heat training camp.
“I know this camp,” said Wade, who is entering his 16th and final NBA season. “I know what to expect. I can run this camp. If coach wanted to go back to the hotel I can run it. UD can run it. We’ve been here.”
Another thing Wade knows, too, is the Heat’s way of running training camp is different than the way other teams do it. After going through camp with the Chicago Bulls in 2016 and the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2017, the future Hall of Fame guard sees the difference.
“The Miami Heat is just different,” Wade said. “It’s just different. I enjoyed the other camps. But this one is a lot different, the intensity. It’s just different. I definitely feel like the other camps are more basketball playing, just more get out there and get up and down and scrimmaging. We’re more structured early on.”
Health update
As expected, James Johnson and Dion Waiters were the only Heat players held out of Tuesday’s practice.
Johnson has not been cleared for contact work after surgery to repair a sports hernia in May and isn’t certain that he will be ready for the Oct. 17 regular-season opener at Orlando, and Waiters is likely to miss the start of the season as he recovers from January ankle surgery.
Johnson said he was involved in some non contact 3-on-3 dills, but mostly sat out the first practice. “Helping as much as possible,” he said.
Meanwhile, center Hassan Whiteside was a full participant at the start of camp after missing 28 games last season because of multiple issues. “All the pains are gone,” he said.
“He looks good,” coach Erik Spoelstra said of Whiteside. “It’s not by accident either. If you put in that type of training in the summer, it’s always great to see these kind of results. And he had a good day today. He’s in shape, he’s able to go through all the drills, activity, the competition without having to sit out anything.”
‘True UD form’
One day after 38-year-old forward Udonis Haslem climbed atop a backboard on the Heat practice floor and yelled, “D-Wade got the last dance. I got the last stance,” during the middle of media day, Wade called the move “UD like.”
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“That was UD like. There you go. He did it in true UD form,”Wade said Tuesday with a smile. “Because normally he would go up there and wrap his legs around the rim and all that. So that was true UD form. It was a great picture.”
Haslem, who is entering his 16th NBA season, later said he was just having fun and not making an official announcement regarding his future.
“He does things like that a lot,” Wade said of Haslem climbing the basket. “For an old guy, he’s still pretty athletic and can jump up and get on things.”
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