Wade on Heat-Raptors: 'I don't know how much tighter your butt cheeks can get'

The Toronto Raptors and Miami Heat have dragged each other (and themselves) through the muck for four games, in what's been both the closest and most aesthetically displeasing series of the playoffs so far.

With three of the four games being decided in overtime, and the other in the final minute of regulation, there hasn't been much to separate the teams, and the margin for error has been paper thin.

"I don't know how much tighter your butt cheeks can get than this series," Heat guard Dwyane Wade - who's been the best player in the series - said Wednesday, according to James Herbert of CBS Sports.

The Raptors, for their part, have been here more than once this postseason. An unnamed team official called their first-round Game 2 against the Indiana Pacers the "tightest-sphinctered game in Toronto basketball history."

Of the Heat series, Raptors coach Dwane Casey said: "I've been sleeping like a baby. Waking up and crying."

On both sides, the defense has been tough and the offensive execution has been a mess. Neither team has scored more than 95 points in regulation. They've averaged fewer combined assists than any two teams in any playoff series in the last 10 years. But with a crucial Game 5 looming in Toronto on Wednesday night, Wade says all that matters is that the Heat be prepared to play hard for a full 48 minutes, if not 53.

"Stay with it, man. Until the final buzzer," Wade said at shootaround. "I think it's shown in this series, this is really a final-buzzer kind of thing. No lead is safe for a team. We've had, the games we lost, I think we had a six-point lead in both fourth quarters and lost those games, and they had a lead in the last game and lost it, so you just gotta keep playing it all the way through.

"It's one of the most grimy kind of series that I've ever played in ... the rhythm sometimes is not there, for neither side. But this is Eastern Conference playoff basketball."

That's one way to put it.