For Bulls, Heat, Game 2 a long time coming

At last, the Heat’s long, regional nightmare is over. This is no exaggeration, at least not in the midn of the team’s head coach as he waited out the final minutes before Game 2 against the Bulls arrived.

“It’s a nightmare,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said about 90 minutes before Game 2. “Two days in between after a performance like that, it’s a long time. We all wanted to get after it yesterday.”

In all likelihood, the Bulls felt similarly juiced to continue their momentum. But their head coach predictably wasn’t inclined to fuel the antsiness, instead shrugging it off and accepting it as matter of fact.

“It comes back to how you approach things all season long to build habits,” Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau said. “During the course of the season, you’re also faced with so many different things, whether it be back to back, four in five, early start, late start, then all of a sudden you hit a point in the season where you might have three or four days off.

“If you’re consistent with your approach, that prepares you for things like this. And then you don’t want to change anything. You want to have that habit already instilled. Game 1 over, go to practice the next day, study, make your corrections, strive for improvement. Sometimes, an extra day of rest is good. That’s the way you have to look at it.”

bchamilton@tribune.com

Twitter @ChiTribHamilton