TORONTO — Not only was Norman Powell listed on the Miami Heat injury report with groin soreness ahead of Thursday night’s game against the Toronto Raptors, but the veteran guard said that might be the case for as long as the team’s season plays out.
“When you have muscle strains and things like that, you can rehab and everything, but it takes time. You just need rest,” Powell said after the morning shootaround at Scotiabank Arena. “I just feel like I need rest. I need time to let the body do what it needs to do.
“But even though I can get it to a certain point where it feels good, there’s no pain and everything, it doesn’t mean that it’s 100% healed. Over time, an accumulated amount of stress on the area, then it starts to flare back up.”
So a determination to play through, amid a season when he already has missed 23 games, but also the appreciation that such an approach could leave him compromised.
“The good thing,” he said, “is that there’s no event that happened or a pop or anything that occurred to where it’s something bigger. It’s just accumulated stress. The scar tissue probably hasn’t healed the way it needed to or hasn’t had the time to properly heal, because we do the rehab or whatever and we get it to where there’s no pain.
“Then I go back out there and I’m playing and I’m doing things. I’m doing my workouts. I’m doing all this stuff that I normally do in my normal routine. Then it starts to open back up. So I won’t be able to fully get to 100% until I have an adequate amount of time to be able to rest and do a full rehab on it.”
With the Heat locked into the play-in round, such time off is not forthcoming, the Heat lacking the week off that the direct-entry top-six seeds in each conference receive for the April 11-12 start of the best-of-seven first round of the playoffs
Instead, the Heat move on to Washington for a game Friday night, then Sunday night’s regular-season finale against the Atlanta Hawks, and then a play-in game either Tuesday or Wednesday next week.
“Like I said,” Powell, 32, continued, “there’s never been one incident where I popped it or I tore it or things like that. It’s just accumulated stress over time, which causes soreness.”
Powell is in the final year of a contract that pays $20.5 million this season. He is eligible for an extension, otherwise to become a free agent July 1.
Alternate reality
With the Heat entering Thursday night’s game at 41-38, coach Erik Spoelstra spoke at Thursday’s shootaround about being three opponents away from something far better.
“There’s three teams we haven’t beaten,” he said. “If you just wiped out, which you can’t do, those three teams, we have a damn good record.”
As in entering Thursday night 0-3 against the Raptors, with an 0-5 record against the Orlando Magic and 0-4 record against the Boston Celtics in season series that have been completed.
“We’re 0-12 on these kind of teams and we just have to conquer it,” Spoelstra said. ” At least we know what it is. We’ve had great success in the rest of the league, and there’s enough habits in those kind of games.”
The Raptors and Magic stand as potential Heat play-in opponents.
The flip side is the Heat are 11-1 against the tanking Wizards, Brooklyn Nets, Chicago Bulls and Memphis Grizzlies, with Friday night’s game remaining against the Wizards.
Worth noting with Friday night’s game in Washington is that the Wizards now are locked into a 14% shot at landing the No. 1 selection in June’s draft, the highest odds available in the lottery, reducing the need for must-lose mode.