“I don’t mind any of that as long as it doesn’t go over the top,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said.” It’s what competition brings at the highest level.”

Here is a look at the key points:

— Pacers guard Lance Stephenson got into it with pretty much everyone, though mostly Dwyane Wade and Mario Chalmers. He had two particularly unfriendly interactions with Wade, one of which leading to a double technical and the other resulting in Stephenson’s second technical and subsequent ejection.

— LeBron James was called for a Flagrant I foul on an offensive foul against Roy Hibbert. James’ elbow hit Hibbert in the jaw and sent him to the locker room for examination. [James, on that play: “I made a basketball jump. If I could jump in the air, elbow somebody in the face in the air and still try to finish a play, I must be a Kung Fu master or something. His face happened to hit my elbow or my elbow happened to hit his face.”]

— Indiana reserve Ian Mahinmi took James down from behind on a drive to the basket. Somewhere in that crash, James took a hit to the nose and began bleeding. He broke his nose in late February at Oklahoma City and was unsure how much damage was done to it tonight.

“Our guys are getting punched in the face, man,” Chris Bosh said. “We’re getting punched in the face and clotheslined out there and we’re getting two shots and then we get an offensive foul call and it’s a flagrant. I guess maybe we need to really decipher what flagrant means because I don’t feel like they were going for the ball in plenty of situations.

“If you can come down and clothesline somebody, it’s open season and people are gonna get hurt. I don’t know. We’re gonna have to revisit what flagrant foul means. They had one and we had none even though LeBron got punched in the face and clotheslined. I guess it was a play on the ball.”

As for James, who scored 38 points in the loss, he was as angry as he has been all season. He sat in front of his locker continuously moving his knees back and forth in agitation as he gave short answers.

Here is a sample of what he said:

On the physical nature of the game: “Not frustrating. It is what it is.”

On the Flagrant I assessed to him: “Of course I’m surprised, but it is what it is. They ref the game and we play it.”

On what this loss means: “Nothing. We’re gonna be 1 or 2 no matter what happens with tonight’s game. It means nothing.”

On the most frustrating thing about his team right now: “I don’t know. It’s a lot.”

On the final play: “Just ran the play.”

On how he is officiated: “I don’t want to fall into the pit of what’s going on, but I see me and Blake Griffin take some hard hits and they call it how they want to call it. It’s very frustrating. As a player, you play the game the right way and sometimes it just don’t fall your way.”

On Stephenson’s antagonistic behavior: “What about him? It had nothing to do with the game. Whatever.”