Mateo’s Hoop Diary: Tyler Herro’s rampage leads the Heat past the hot Hornets

It was a track meet between two division rivals, and the Heat narrowly escaped Charlotte on the second night of a back-to-back. The confrontation, featuring one surging team and the other hanging on, had high stakes as both are after the coveted sixth seed, which bypasses the Play-In Tournament.

Tyler Herro got targeted, but he was the Heat’s main source of offense along with Pelle Larsson, Bam Adebayo and Kel’el Ware as the Heat were down three going into intermission. Charlotte had found production from second opportunities and transition strikes, while Brandon Miller made six baskets at short and long range.

The team subsequently had trouble finishing at close range in the third quarter but that was offset by their scorching 3-point shooting which was needed to match Charlotte’s long-range assault. Herro and Davion Mitchell scored four shots apiece on mostly jump shots from long range, yet they ended the period still down three. 

Herro’s rampage continued, and the game shifted on three straight possessions: he curled around a handoff for a trey off an inbound then lobbed it to Ware for a vicious dunk through traffic, and Adebayo nailed a baseline jumper, giving them their largest lead of the night (7) as crunch time began.  

Despite the Hornets responding quickly with four 3-pointers, Herro and Dru Smith were there to bail them out with a pull-up jumper at the elbow and a tip-in.

The Heat won 128-120, with eight of the team’s 18 made triples belonging to Herro.  

Takeaways:

The Heat entered this game having won 14 of their last 25 games, and the Hornets had a 19-6 record, including a six-game win streak, in that span. The win gave the Heat the tiebreaker. They scored 130.6 points per 100 possessions, good enough for the 89th percentile, per Cleaning the Glass. Keep in mind that Charlotte had posted the sixth-ranked defense in that span.

The Heat are the fastest team in the league, but they are terribly inefficient when raising the pace. The Hornets were much sharper, logging a 12-7 edge in first-half fastbreak points then outpointed them 9-2 after intermission. 

Both squads combined for 13 3-pointers and each scored 40 points heading into the fourth quarter. It was easily one of the most entertaining sequences of their season.

Herro was the team’s engine, having the best game of his career. He logged 35 points, including eight treys on 80% shooting, with nine rebounds, nine assists and zero turnovers. His first miss from long range came on his seventh attempt.

Lots of games are won in the trenches. Moussa Diabate was a force on the offensive glass in the third quarter, supplying multiple second-chance triples. Charlotte even had 21 second-chance points before the fourth quarter started. Ware’s four blocks were some of the little things that helped the Heat survive in the trenches.