PHOENIX -- On a night when Lebron James was playing through illness and needed to save himself as much as possible, Chris Bosh provided the offensive support Miami needed to take care of business.
Bosh had 16 first-half points, and finished with 24 on 9-of-11 shooting, to go along with nine rebounds, three assists, and two blocked shots. Without that effort, it’s unlikely that Miami would have had the horses to get this win. Both James and Erik Spoelstra were well aware of this afterward, and had nothing but high praise for their team’s most quiet superstar.
“He’s such an impact to our team, so efficient,” James said. “He gets his points so quietly, makes jumpshots, gets to the free throw line, makes things happen for our team and we all feed off of that. And I tried to feed off of that as well.”
Spoelstra took it a step further, after noting it took him two and a half minutes into his postgame press conference before Bosh’s name even came up.
“He is our most important player, and he’s as steady and consistent as he always has been for the last two and a half years,” Spoelstra said. “He makes it look easy and he makes it look quiet, and yet he’s so impactful in the game. He was big under the rim and not just his scoring, but the big plays defensively at the end.”
Bosh said he did come in with more of a mindset to shoulder the offense with Wade out and with James being less than 100 percent.
“We can’t always expect LeBron to be LeBron all the time,” he said. “He’s not just going to be [perfect], whether it’s physically or whether it’s a bad game. It’s just not going to be A+ all the time.
“I just try to make shots, but I don’t do anything differently. The shots were open, my teammates found me, and I was just working out of the mid-range post a little bit, just trying to get some flow going to the game and it worked out.”
The Suns slowed Bosh a little in the second half from a scoring standpoint, but it didn’t change the impact he had on his team’s success. The attention Bosh required from the defense opened things up a little bit on the wings, and James and Mario Chalmers both took advantage of the increased opportunities.
The fact that Bosh plays at an All-Star level, but does so without the ego and the need for the spotlight makes him a perfect fit to play alongside Wade and James. It also makes it easy to see why Spoelstra and James speak so highly of him, and understand just how important he is to the team’s overall success.
“I let the game develop and I let it come to me,” Bosh said. “I don’t just go hunting for anything, if I have post-ups and I get doubled I move off the ball. I don’t like to force bad shots, I like to take high percentage shots. And that’s what makes us so dangerous. We move the ball so much and we play together to put pressure on the defense.”
