The Miami Heat’s Tyler Herro has been up and down across the restart scrimmages. You can attribute the inconsistency to growing pains for the rookie.
The Miami Heat got smacked around a bit on Tuesday. Facing off against the Memphis Grizzlies, the Miami Heat started the game playing from behind and never closed the gap.
While the Miami Heat could have been a bit more polished and disciplined defensively, perhaps a lot more in the second half, you can’t really be sure how much it would have helped. The Grizzlies were shooting the ball tremendously well all afternoon. To put it plainly, they played out of their minds on Tuesday.
Ja Morant finished with 22 points, 12 assists, and three rebounds and teammate Dillon Brooks finished with 23 points, three assists, and a board of his own. Brooks scored 18 of his points in the second half.
The Miami Heat defense was just a part of the problem on Tuesday though and while quite a few of the Miami Heat players didn’t have their best offensive game with them, few of them struggled as mightily as Tyler Herro. The up and down nature of his game has really been puzzling lately.
Stranger than that, it manifests itself in a few different ways, with neither of them being any better than the other. He has been wildly inconsistent from possession to possession, quarter to quarter, and definitely game to game in this restart. There are three main points to make on the subject though in his defense.
Tyler Herro is experiencing a bit of inconsistency in the NBA restart. It’s alright though, he’s just getting better by going through a little bit.
You first look at the fact that he has been asked to do more creating and facilitating since the restart began. In watching him during the first game, where he led the second unit, his jump shot looked a bit hitchy, most of the time coming up short.
The safe assumption there is that his timing and rhythm were just a bit off due to learning/adjusting to new platforms.
Where he is usually only dribbing to create for himself or catching and shooting, he has now explored dribbling or penetrating to create for others, where the split-second decision of having to decide whether to get his or get someone else involved has thrown his timing off. It happens, believe me.
Basketball is a very nuanced game that relies on repetition and consistency. Change the slightest thing about yourself, such as your weight, strength, or in his case, the scoring mechanics that got him to the league, see how it affects your ability to play basketball. That is sort of what is going on with Herro’s timing it seems, from the outside looking in, of course.
You also take into account the fact that the league has been on a layoff. Herro also missed about a month or so of action before that, so it could be him continuing to shake off the rust as well.
With relativity of some sort between every reason mentioned above, I just view it as growing pains as a whole, while I would like to believe these last few scrimmage games are him working through it. I tend to believe that once things start for real, he’ll be ready. Heck, he could be the Heat’s X-factor.
The games start to count again in just a day, so he has but a short while to improve it as much as he can. I trust that he and the coaching staff will do just that. This though has been why I believe that Tyler Herro is the picture of ‘growing pains’ right now.