The Miami HEAT are 2-4, 1-0 in Group B for the In-Season Tournament, with a Net Rating of -3.7, No. 21 in the league. After hosting the Los Angeles Lakers on Monday they head out for a four-game road trip. Here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing.
IT'S BEEN...ONE WEEK
As smaller storylines emerge from this young season – Jaime Jaquez Jr. being immediately playable, Haywood Highsmith joining the starting lineup, Bam Adebayo raising his usage rate once again – Tyler Herro has clearly been the brightest spot of what has otherwise been a slow start for Miami.
After opening the schedule with a 7-of-24 night against Detroit, Herro averaged 27 points over the past five games on 49 percent shooting, 47.7 percent from three, which stands as the most efficient five-game stretch of his career. That alone would be an encouraging achievement especially as Herro has upped his usage to 28.4 percent from 25.6 last season – as we often note, raising volume while sustaining efficiency is generally the simplest arithmetic for getting your name in All-Star conversations without sacrificing game-to-game impact.
The question to ask here is, what’s changed? On the surface, not a ton. While Herro is scoring five more points per game than he did during his 2021-22 Sixth Man of the Year campaign, he’s also playing six more minutes – Spoelstra typically keeps his stars under 35 in the long run, while Herro us upwards of 38 now – and taking four more shots, so per 100 possessions his scoring is less than a full point higher than two seasons ago. Herro’s assist rate has ticked up slightly – he flirted with a triple double for most of the night against Washington – but his true-shooting is less than 10 percentage points higher than it was in either of the past two seasons. Even his usage, while higher than last year when he joined the starting group, is just below what it was when Herro led the bench unit, and both his rim and free-throw rates are right in line with career norms. The shot quality is mostly unchanged. He’s not driving more often, but they’ve been his most effective drives since he's shooting 55 percent on floaters – shots Herro says Erik Spoelstra considers “layups” as long as they’re dotted line or below. The primary driver of this stretch of efficiency is Herro shooting 58 percent on catch-and-shoot threes.
So, what is it then? Is this just a random hot streak? There’s always an element of that whenever a player is touching career bests over any length of time. You also can’t just hand wave away the possibility of true skill progression. Maybe a month from now he has a five-game streak even better than this one.
That’s all in the numbers, and we’ll continue to track those as always, but what’s most interesting this season isn’t necessarily within the numbers. It’s in how Herro handled all the offseason noise. In how Herro talks about his own game, and the intention behind it.
“It’s starting to feel or shape up how I want it to be,” Herro says when asked about his early shot profile before playing Washington. “The Boston game, Bucks game and [Brooklyn] were kind of my shot profile.
“[Against] Detroit and Minnesota I took a lot of contested tough two’s, which isn’t in my shot profile so that’s the part I didn’t like. Threes, getting to the rim and then I’m a good pullup shooter in the mid-range so I can get to it, but just as long as they’re not heavily contested. Getting to my floaters and my runners. I can make any shot on the floor. It’s just about having the airspace and then not being overly contested.”
In speaking with Herro, he’s more mindful of his strengths and weaknesses than ever. The nightly process is less about finding solutions to problems, finding counters to different kinds of pressure, and more cycling through pre-existing answers as he reads the game in real time. The most promising number of all is that even with increased usage in increased minutes, Herro's turnover rate is at a career-low 9.3 percent. There’s a calm to his game, particularly navigating the paint with a live dribble and keeping one defender on his back while eating the space another defender gives him in front, that wasn’t there two years ago.
Notebook 57: Patient Herro Score
“Just being patient, and also it’s my job to make the right plays, not be sped up and not be rushed,” Herro says. “I have the trust of my teammates and coaches to keep my dribble alive.”
Is it all enough to place Herro among the elite? That’s a January question, not a Game 6 question. The best of the best offensive players, the ones who garner All-NBA votes not just All-Star attention, regularly have stretches like the one Herro is having right now. We don’t need to steal the joy from the moment by making comparisons.
What’s clear is that the past week has been among the best Herro has ever had. That’s enough for right now.
CAGE MATCH
A little more on Herro, only on the opposite side of the ball. It’s no secret that for the past few years, Herro’s numbers defending in isolation have been among the worst in the league. Teams have generally singled him out on switches as often as possible and even with Miami shrinking the floor on his flanks to protect him, the numbers haven’t been great.
So far, some progress there, too. After allowing 1.11, 1.04 and 1.12 points-per-direct isolation, per Second Spectrum, over the past three seasons, Herro is only allowing 1.00 so far on 15 opportunities. That may not seem like a big difference, but it’s enough to put a player in the middle of the pack rather than in the lowest tenth percentile.
Against Washington on Friday, Jordan Poole tried to take Herro off the bounce and Herro read the move, moved his feet and stonewalled Poole into picking up his dribble.
Notebook 57: Herro Stops Poole
“I’m not a bad defender, I’m trying to tell you guys,” Herro said with a hint of a smile after the game. “You watch the game, I’m decent. I’m decent. I’m being better, I’m telling you.
“In the league, you have to learn a bunch of different things, it doesn’t just come like this. Being a rookie, younger guy in the league, you’re already set back a couple years because you have to learn everything. My wingspan and everything else doesn’t help that I have to learn all that on the fly. Being able to pick up on things and learn things and take them over to the next season and continue to build off that, I think I’ll just continue to be a solid defender and continue to get better. I have speed and quickness and I feel like I can read plays before they happen.”
Bam Adebayo backed him up.
“He’s definitely stepped up, he’s definitely taken those challenges. He’s not getting blown by as much, he’s actually staying in front of guys and low-key putting them in a box.”
All statistics are swinging wildly from game to game still, but right now Miami is allowing 11.5 fewer points per 100 possessions with Herro – turning in a career-high steal rate – with Herro on the floor. That’s not all due to him, as who you’re playing with most often matters a ton, but it is a change from recent years when Herro’s differential was typically neutral at best, outright negative at worst. Even two-man lineups with Herro and Duncan Robinson are only allowing 109.5 points per 100.
There are still some ugly moments, moments where he gets overpowered or left watching a speedster quick on by, only there’s fewer than before. Enough so to say that maybe Herro is right. He’s no lockdown guy. He’s not putting clamps on anyone for an entire game – though Poole didn’t score one points on Herro all night. He just might be, as he put it, decent.
On the other side of this coin, would you like to see what poor defense looks like?
Notebook 57: Poole Into Screens
If you want an example for why we shouldn’t read too much into Miami’s 119.8 offensive rating against Washington, it’s that. Anytime the HEAT wanted a clean look, they weren’t too tough to come by.
…WHY?
Every week, every month, every year, some young player draws Bam Adebayo on a switch and thinks there’s a great opportunity in front of him. Typically, they’re correct, just not in the way they think they are. It’s a great opportunity to learn The Lesson.
Friday night, it was second-year player Ryan Rollins’ turn.
Notebook 57: Ryan Rollins Bam
Adebayo has defended 14 isolations so far this season. He’s allowed two points. That’s 0.14 points per. Among the 117 players who have defended at least 10 isolations, that’s No. 1.
With Adebayo on the floor, Miami is allowing 12 fewer points per 100 possessions than with him sitting. It’s going to take a while for that to normalize, but among bigs with at least 1,500 minutes last season, Draymond Green had the best differential at 9.8 points per 100 better. He’s right on track.
TIDBITS
-With Miami taking 24.9 percent of their shots at the rim, this is what Spoelstra had to say about the team’s shot profile before playing Washington:
“We just have to be mindful of our profile,” Spoelstra said. “We don’t have to be so strict with it, these guys are shot makers, but we do know that we have to attack. We have to put pressure on the rim, we have not done that consistently enough. We’ve been able to do it at times. We haven’t been able to sustain that. And then developing our collective IQ of our identity, and context of game does matter, so these are not absolute decisions. These are reading the game decisions that we need to show improvement on. And then ultimately if we do that I believe our profile, in terms of getting more attempts at the rim, more free throw attempts, we do that its going to open up the three point line. If we’re not doing aggressive things then often times the only thing we’re left with is the shot we don’t want a heavy diet of.”
Miami’s three-point rate is still about four percentage points below where it was last season (33.8 after 37.5).
-Haywood Highsmith on being inserted into the starting lineup on Friday: “My journey here has been crazy. Now I’m at this point where Coach Spo trusts me enough to put me in the starting lineup. That says a lot. That means a lot.”
-Miami's fourth quarter against Milwaukee on Monday (1.64 ppp) was their third-most efficient quarter against Milwaukee in the past five seasons, playoffs included.
-After allowing a comeback run to Brooklyn on Wednesday and a 15-0 run to Washington after that game was mostly in hand, Miami’s fourth-quarter Net Rating currently sits at -22.0.
-With 35 assists against Washington, Miami’s assist percentage – the share of total made baskets that were assisted – is at 64.7, up from 60.8 last season after a multi-year downward trend in that category.
-It’s only 40 possessions, but Miami’s zone has allowed 1.475 points-per thus far, which is notable because the trend with the zone is that it starts out extremely well and gradually gets closer to their man-to-man defensive numbers as the season moves along. The sample here is so small it doesn’t mean anything yet, but it’s worth considering that after setting record zone numbers last season, teams could be actively preparing for it more than ever before. Or they could be just hitting shots.
-With Washington shooting 26-of-28 at the rim, Miami is now allowing 33.5 percent of opponent shots to come in the restricted area and 70.4 percent shooting in that zone. The latter number is not unusual for Miami, but the first is as they typically end up under 30 percent for one of the best marks in the league. The best summation of their defense has long been that you aren’t going to get to the rim against them very often, but teams that earn the opportunities with ball movement and pace generally shoot a decent percentage.
-It’s been a slow shooting start for Josh Richardson, but it is interesting that through his first three games he’s putting up 6.1 assists per 100 possessions, which would be a career-high mark following his last season in Miami. His usage isn’t what it once was now that he’s playing alongside three established scorers, but the system might be a better fit for him than other teams were.
-Despite leading by more than 20 in the second half, Miami only beating Washington by seven means their point-differential – the tiebreaker in group play – advantage over Milwaukee, who beat New York by five in a nip-and-tuck game, is only two points. Unless Miami goes 4-0, which is certainly possible, there’s a good chance that point differential is the difference between going to Las Vegas for knockout games or not.