Will Tyler Herro’s Scoring Ability be Key in Miami Heat’s Playoff Push?

Tyler Herro went down trying to save a ball with about a minute left in the first half of the Miami Heat’s first-round series opener.

It took him some time to get up and run off to the locker room. However, when he suddenly realized that the referee hadn’t blown his whistle and that the Heat were still on offense, he stood in a corner on the sidelines, clutching his right hand and frowning in pain. He didn’t get it when Gabe Vincent still passed the ball to him in the open. Herro stayed on the field for the remainder of the first half before dropping out of the game.

Although the Heat won the game, bad news came out after the game. The Heat announced that Herro’s right hand was broken and will likely take about six weeks to recover.

The Miami Heat finished the regular season with a 44-38 record, a negative point differential and 25th in the NBA in offensive efficiency. Herro averaged 20.1 points per game on a 56.6 true shooting percentage, and his usage rate was 25%, slightly higher than Jimmy Butler.

The Heat need his firepower, and he’s shooting 36.9 percent from three with some volume. In addition, his duo with Bam Adebayo is the scoring method the team relies on, and losing him is undoubtedly a blow to their slim chances against Milwaukee at the time.

However, the Heat beat the Bucks in Game 3, in which Duncan Robinson, who hadn’t played in the first half of Game 1, scored 20 points in 23 minutes. They also won Game 4, with 56 points from Butler and some clutch jumpers from Caleb Martin. In Game 5, Butler scored 42 points and won the game in overtime, Vincent contributed 22 points, Kevin Love made 5 of 11 three-pointers, just like they did in the 2020 bubble league. Did that, knocked out the Bucks.

Now, the Miami Heat are in the NBA Finals again, knocking out the New York Knicks and then the second-seeded Boston Celtics. Last Friday, it was Herro’s 42nd day of surgery. Most reports indicated that he was expected to return for Wednesday’s Game 3 against the Nuggets.

However, given the Heat’s success this season and who they face in the Finals, they face tricky questions. How much the presence of their starting shooting guard (who recently signed a $120 million, four-year deal) helps the team, and how much a return could hurt.

It’s a sweet burden, but an awkward one indeed. The absence of Herro not only forced Butler to take on more offensive burdens, but also found space for Martin, Vincent, Robinson and Max Strus to play on the offensive end, while also allowing the Heat’s coaching staff to find a new balance from the rotation. The Heat went from an average defensive team to a top-notch defensive team by completely leaving out a player who played longer minutes and focused only on offense.

In Thursday’s season-ending press conference, Celtics general manager Brad Stevens said the team “had a hard time on the first line of defense against the Heat because of the help defense. Very spot on.”, and the Heat’s pressure on the ball forced Boston to start the offense later than they’d like and stall late in the game.

Will Herro’s scoring ability be valuable against the Denver Nuggets? Of course, the premise is that he can recover in less than two months and can adapt to an extremely intense environment. If there’s a legitimate reason to doubt the Nuggets’ title chances as they pile up wins in the regular season, it’s that they might run into a ball in the playoffs that can stretch the floor offensively. Team.

Even with healthy players like Jamal Murray, Michael Porter Jr., Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Bruce Brown, they’re theoretically afraid of teams like last year’s Golden State Warriors and the year before the Phoenix Suns.

More precisely, they are afraid of teams that rely on spacing, precise passing and autonomous shooting as their main offensive method. At this point, the Herro-Adebayo duo could become a key focus.

On the face of it, Miami’s 104-93 loss in Game 1 seemed to suggest that Herro had every chance of playing a hero role. The Heat are scoring a measly 100 points per 100 possessions, and they’re only scoring 93.3 points in the half court, according to statistics. Butler scored 13 points on 14 shots and no free throws. This was their least efficient game of the playoffs, and since the Denver Nuggets were also extremely inefficient, it can be concluded that Miami can make some defensive sacrifices in exchange for offensive scoring.