There is nothing like the experience of watching Tyler Herro. Not this year, and maybe not ever. At least not in Miami.
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Before you grab your pitchfork or, let’s be honest, open up Twitter, this isn’t to say he’s the most talented or even the best watch. Dwyane and Shaq and LeBron and Chris and Jimmy and Goran are all there, and this isn’t a commentary on any of them. Herro is just his own thing, a uniquely blended firecracker smoothie who with a single shot attempt makes the home crowd make a noise that might not have been possible in any previous decade. His game, by nature, is more feast or famine than those previously named, but the masses have just as short a memory for his misses as he does. The stretches where the eating is good are so propulsive they may as well be scored by Hans Zimmer.
He’s a walking, talking, sunglasses-at-night experience. An entertainer in every sense, one whose accidental heel turn of sorts, perception wise, last year was not-coincidentally made possible by the crowds going full-digital. He’s put on this earth to play in front of the people, to cause gasps and guffaws and murmurs and buzz the same as Steph Curry or Trae Young. But all this we knew.
What’s different now is that beneath the show, we’re getting as good a look as ever at the actual basketball player Herro is becoming.
One of the most interesting questions this HEAT season, one that we’ve explored on a few different occasions, is what qualifies as a good shot or a bad shot for a player such as Herro? Does that sort of calculus even apply to a player like him, in a role like the one he has? With former bench scorer Goran Dragic traded to Toronto in the Kyle Lowry deal, Erik Spoelstra cast Herro in that microwave spot and has done everything he could to keep him there no matter how many injuries Miami has dealt with. Shot creation and all the reliability that comes with it is the obvious need, but it’s the sheer possibility of Herro that is almost more valuable. Flammability wins you games that stability doesn’t.
Herro has responded to the ask shouldering a 29 percent usage rate that only 25 players in the history of the league have hit before their age-23 season, and he’s done it with efficiency almost perfectly in line with what he did in more supportive roles his first two years.
With that in mind, does a bad shot exist for Herro if the HEAT need him to take some bad shots?
“That’s always evolving,” Herro says. “I feel like I have games where I take a couple bad shots but they will be good shots for me. It just depends on the coverages that they’re playing and how I got it going and how the team is flowing that night. I can take and make tough shots. Some things that may look like bad shots for others aren’t really bad shots for me.”
Fair, and accurate. Of the 23 players who have taken at least 500 shots this season, only three – Kevin Durant, Brandon Ingram and DeMar DeRozan – have a tougher Shot Quality, Second Spectrum’s metric which takes into account everything from shot location to the number of dribbles taken and the level of contest. If you reduce the threshold to 200, Herro is still 173-of-179, with names like Chris Paul, Devin Booker, Paul George and Luka Doncic showing in his vicinity. It’s a star diet, through and through.
Watch the clips below. For some players even the thought of taking these would imply that they’re in the midst of the most important, most wildly confident game of their season. For Herro, it’s merely Tuesday.
“If I hadn’t seen him so often in our workouts and practices and his summer development,” Spoelstra said, “If I hadn’t seen all of that then maybe you would look at some of these plays and say ‘Well, what else is available? But I’ve seen him make and work on those shots hour after hour.”
The rub is that Herro is not particularly efficient when it comes to the star package. Not yet, at least. Using Second Spectrum data, of 48 players with at least 100 isolations, he’s No. 43 producing 0.82 points-per-isolation. As a pick-and-roll scorer, he’s No. 36-of-48 at 0.82 points-per-pick. On drives, not including passes (we’ll get to those later), he’s No. 51-of-58 at 0.84 points-per-drive.
You can parse it a hundred different ways, but without belaboring the point the simplest is that of the 44 players who have taken at least 200 shots following at least two dribbles – go-create-something looks, filtering out one-dribble relocations – he’s No. 42 with an effective field-goal percentage of 41.9. All those tough shots add up. It matters both for now and the future for him and the team that he can even get them off. Proving you can handle true volume is not something many can do. But what may seem like his forte if you only catch him on the right night or in highlight reels is very much a style of play he’s still growing into.
It also might not matter, because Herro is already being defended like a star shot creator. In his first two years, Herro faced a big showing, blitzing or trapping at least six pick-and-rolls in a single game only three times. Beginning with Indiana in the second game of this year, that’s happened seven times already. If it’s not a blitz, it’s often a hard switch. Teams have clued in to the fact that giving a potent, quick-trigger mid-range shooter a nice, comfy mid-range cushion with drop coverage isn’t exactly a winning formula.
“I wouldn’t play drop coverage on me either,” Herro said. “I’m trying to get used to the different coverages and the blitz packages and the high hedges and stuff like that. The different defenses. It’s going to take some time to continue to learn. It’s a good problem to have as a young player in this league to continue to see different reads and defenses early on so I can be ready.”
Oddly enough, Herro’s numbers against the switch and the blitz are very good. The switch makes sense when you watch the clips as it’s clear Herro and his coach find success where they can force a busted coverage with creatively timed and angled screens. Lengthy defenders can give him issues as he’s among the Top 10 in getting his shot blocked. Play with pace against the attempted, not-yet completed switch and the defense isn’t going to get the flattened-out possession that it wants.
“I kind of know what to do against switches,’ Herro said. “Right now the coverage I’m trying to figure out is the blitz when they come high and try to get me off the ball. Still trying to figure that out.”
You can see his processing speed improving when the defense gets aggressive. For all the handwringing about Duncan Robinson’s shooting, he and Herro are regularly drawing a second defender when they run off a body. Using either a screen or a handoff, Herro is producing well over 1.0 points-per-possession when the defense sends two (blitzing or showing) – good enough to put him No. 2 in the league, behind Trae Young, of the 16 players who have faced that coverage at least 100 times. Adebayo hasn’t been around to truly be maximized in the gravity-manufactured 4-on-3 situations, but Spoelstra has his shooters trusting whatever big is on the floor and it’s working.
“Coverages are changing a little bit and teams are being a little more aggressive to try and get the ball out of his hands like all really good scorers in this league,” Spoelstra said. “He has the vision, he has the skillset, to do it, he just needs the reps and experience.”
“Getting off the ball isn’t the worst thing, when there’s two guys on me we can play 4-on-3 and beat you that way,” Herro said.
If we told you that Herro was having nearly the exact same sparkplug season as Jordan Clarkson did for Utah last season, how would that make you feel? That’s a positive outcome, given that Clarkson won the Sixth Man of the Year award that Herro is clearly in the conversation for. What gives Herro a little separation from Clarkson, what keeps him from being purely field-goal percentage dependent – given the lack of consistent trips to the free-throw line – is that willingness to move the ball. To draw the defender and make a play for someone else.
Nobody is going to mistake Herro for Luka Doncic or Young to that end. Both of those players have assist percentages around or above 45, at the top of the league. Herro is at 21 percent. There are nights when the turnovers mount. There are also nights when he’s reading the defense beat-for-beat and dealing to all the spots Miami’s spacing is designed to fill.
“It’s gotten 10x better on making the right reads,” Spoelstra said recently. “Here’s the problem with this league. Everybody wants scoring. I love the playmaking that Tyler made the other night (against Orlando). The problem with that is he only scored two points. People are judging a lot of different things based on that final stat column, but he had [11] potential assists the other night and he’s just continuing to make the right plays depending on the coverage, depending on the context of the game, and that’s what great players do.”
We’ve buried the best a bit here, which is that Herro’s been one of the best off-ball players around. He may be growing into learning how to carry an offense – we haven’t mentioned his improved handle yet but there are moments when he practically snaps a defender out of existence with a surprise crossover – but when he’s able to get off the ball playing with Butler or Kyle Lowry few have been better. He’s No. 7-of-123 players that have taken at least 90 catch-and-shoot shots with an effective field-goal percentage of 52. Off zero dribbles, which includes the cuts he seems to get once or twice a game when defenders overplay him at the arc, his eFG is up to 69.9, No. 20-of-303 with at least 50 shots.
When a defender is at least four feet away when he gets a look from three? Forget about it. He’s shooting 44 percent of those threes, all 129 of them.
That’s the thing. If the team wanted to keep Herro in a box, he could easily be one of the best shooters in the league and leave it at that. He’s always had the dancer’s footwork, he never seems to stop moving and the leg strength is now there to sustain throughout long games, weeks and months. When he’s alongside the HEAT’s premier, veteran talent, sometimes that’s all he needs to be. Why the bench role makes so much sense, why it’s folly to push a starting spot on him too early, is that he’s afforded the freedom to become more. For five minutes at a time he can dive headfirst into star-level offensive packages, with the usage rate to support it, and then slide right back into a support role that helps to keep his efficiency at-or-above league average. Why mess with a job that lets him be all that he can be?
“It all comes down to impacting winning, which he’s doing at a high level,” Spoelstra said.
You can feel it happening again with Herro. The perception outpacing the production to a degree that sets a player up for failure through no real fault of his own. Same thing that happened between his first and second years, when hype off a postseason performance that was functionally his second-season leap created expectations that would be nearly impossible to live up to during an actual second-season that happened about four days later. Thrilling as it is, The Herro Experience is not Herro, the player or the person. He deserves the benefit of time. Of youth. As much understanding on a night when he scores 21 points on 23 shots as there is exaltation when he scores 32 on 19.
Is he an All-Star? Maybe. The HEAT are fourth in the Eastern Conference, Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler have both missed time, and Kyle Lowry doesn’t score as much despite being instrumental to the survival efforts. Being willing to take the tough shots, the big, important shots, carries weight with voters. The defense still needs work, and it shows on film. It’s complicated, and with a month left of voting there isn’t much cause to predict. Not yet.
What we know is that Herro is going to blow Miami’s franchise records for bench scoring out of the water, and perhaps have one of the best bench scoring seasons in league history. That’ll have him in the awards conversation at the end of the year, just rewards but not what ultimately matters most. All that pomp and circumstance aside, he’s found his game. The lump of clay has taken shape, and it’s one with sharp edges.
It’s a game that can swing a playoff series today. It’s also one with plenty of room for growth down the line. Herro may be an experience. All he needs now are experiences of his own.