Wade and James Mocked Nowitzki's Illness in a Video

A video that showed Miami Heat players LeBron James and Dwyane Wade apparently mocking Dirk Nowitzki's recent illness spread in the Internet and piqued the Dallas Mavericks star.

The video was taken by a CBS affiliate in the morning of Game 5 that the Dallas Mavericks later won largely because of Nowitzki's last quarter leadership.

In the video, Wade walking alongside James following a shootaround coughs then says, "Did you hear me cough? Think I'm sick." After Wade coughs, he and James laugh and tug their collars over their nose and mouth, as Nowitzki did during his interview following the Game 4 Dallas win.

In Game 4, Nowitzki was running a fever due to sinus infection and was seen coughing and sniffling but played anyway to lead the Mavericks to a crucial win that evened up the NBA championship series at 2-2.

Wade and James said their act was meant to be a joke for the rolling cameras and blamed others for making a big deal out of it. Wade said he really did cough.

"First of all, it wasn't fake coughing," Wade said. "I actually did cough. And with the cameras being right there, we made a joke out of it because we knew you guys were going to blow it up. You did exactly what we knew. We never said Dirk's name. I think he's not the only one in the world who can get sick or have a cough. We just had fun with the cameras being right in our face about the blowup of the incident, and it held to be true. You blew it up."

Said James: "If you guys want to feed into everything that not only myself or D-Wade or the Miami Heat do, I think that's a non-issue. There's bigger issues in this series than that."

Nowitzki did not find the video act funny at all as he took it to imply that he feigned illness and described Dwyane Wade and LeBron James as "a little childish, a little ignorant."

"I've been in this league for 13 years. I've never faked an injury or an illness before... But (the video) happened. It's over to me. It's not going to add anything extra to me. This is the NBA finals. If you need an extra motivation, you have a problem," Nowitzki said.