MIAMI—Kyle Lowry was wearing a green Philadelphia Eagles hat so large that if he stepped out into the warm rain falling outside the Miami Heat’s arena, his clothes would not have gotten wet.
Lowry had earned the right to wear such a preposterous hat, which mushroomed about a foot over his brow and outward to almost his shoulders. Lowry, 37, is in his 18th NBA season and is tied for second on the club in games played with 28 and third in total minutes played with 819 (out of a possible 1,440).
Also, both his Heat and his Eagles won their Christmas games on Monday, so why not celebrate with a festive, gaudy, felt cap?
As Lowry exited the Heat locker room, he strolled past Tyler Herro, who was about to answer a question about beating the Philadelphia 76ers 119-113 while missing four rotation players, including star Jimmy Butler. Before Herro could get in a word, Lowry bellowed in a deep, voice-over-like voice, as though he was James Earl Jones: “We have enough.”
“Like Kyle said, we do have enough, no matter who’s playing and who’s sitting,” Herro said. “As you’ve seen lately, we’ve been winning games. But in order to (get to) our ultimate goal of winning a championship, we’ll obviously need everybody.”
It’s another typical regular season on South Beach. The Heat followed last season’s NBA Finals berth and gentleman’s sweep by the Denver Nuggets by being a major runner on the NBA’s summer rumor mill. When the wheels stopped turning, the Heat didn’t have Damian Lillard, and even beyond that, two key role players (Gabe Vincent, Max Strus) were gone. And of course, Miami made good on what it did have (the 18th pick of the NBA Draft) and turned it into Jaime Jaquez Jr., who enjoyed one of the best Christmas games ever by a rookie. The Heat are still getting major contributions out of Lowry and Kevin Love, who had been written off in Cleveland in the middle of last season. And Bam Adebayo and Butler remain two of the top players in the league at their positions.
But the NBA is a league in which the attention goes to the super teams, to the rosters with multiple headliners with reigning MVPs and front offices that succeeded in making those big splashes in free agency and with trades (like Boston and Milwaukee in the East, which both upgraded backcourts and in the Celtics’ case also added Kristaps Porziņģis). The Heat added Josh Richardson to their mix, a fine player but not at the level of Lillard, James Harden, Jrue Holiday or Porziņģis.
Miami also has the assets to take a big swing yet with arguably enough first-round picks and intriguing players (like, say, Herro) to make a run at Donovan Mitchell should he be available or at talented players in Chicago or Toronto.
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But this is always the basic storyline around the Heat. They’re a destination franchise, starving for star power, that happens to end up on the outside when it comes to those major transactions but finds ways to win anyway.
Butler has missed the last three games with a calf strain, and Herro has missed more than a month with a severe ankle sprain. But after beating the Sixers on Christmas, the Heat are 18-12, a half game out of fourth place in the East. They lead the NBA in 3-point percentage despite losing Strus; Adebayo is enjoying arguably his best season; and in limited action, Herro is statistically enjoying his best season.
In 12 games, Herro is averaging 24.0 points (a career high by nearly four points per game) and shooting career bests from the field and 3-point range, and his assists (4.4) also are a career high. But what stands out when watching Herro is that he has been turning his second biggest liability (his first is injuries) into a strength.
In his first four NBA seasons, especially in the playoffs, Herro was the player opponents hunted when they had the ball — he was such a weak defender that game plans forced him into switches and difficult pick-and-rolls.
So far in this campaign, Herro is averaging a career-best 1.3 steals per game, is generally more active in passing lanes and is a bigger contributor to the Heat’s defensive plans. He opened the Christmas game with a chase-down block on Kelly Oubre Jr. and produced a steal in addition to his 22 points.
“He’s reading the game very well,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said of Herro. “He continues to improve on both sides of the floor, and I think it’s due to him being an ambitious player who wants to impact the game. He wants to impact winning. He wants to be known as a winning player. And the winning players do it on both ends of the court. He’s fully embracing that.”
The Heat’s last two seasons have ended in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals and Game 5 of the NBA Finals, respectively, and in both cases, Herro was injured. They pulled ahead of the Celtics 2-1 in the 2022 East finals when Herro went down with a groin injury. And though he played 7 minutes in the Game 7 loss, he was out the three previous games and ineffective in the deciding game. Last season, he broke his thumb in Game 1 of the first-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks and was not seen in another game, though a side story throughout the NBA Finals series with the Nuggets was the possibility that Herro could return.
Herro, 23, is on a four-year, $120 million contract extension that kicked in this season. He was the primary player discussed in the constant Lillard-to-Miami speculation last summer. And given the spectacular rise in defensive performance for Miami in the playoffs with Herro out, it stood to reason that Miami’s path to getting over the top was to turn Herro (and draft capital) either into a more established star or a player who can start and contribute more on defense.
Herro’s apparent defensive improvement potentially changes the calculus.
The Heat haven’t played much this season with a healthy Herro and Butler. Jaquez has been impressive from the outset but is averaging 16.1 points over his last 23 games and, in the short term, has proven to be a capable starter while Butler is injured. Assuming Butler returns early during Miami’s upcoming western trip, Jaquez could continue to see increased minutes because of Caleb Martin’s freshly sprained ankle.
Jaquez scored 31 points and grabbed 10 rebounds Monday, becoming the fifth rookie to ever post at least 30 points and 10 rebounds in his first Christmas game and the first to do so in 38 years. For the season, he is averaging 13.7 points per game — fourth among rookies — and the Heat rave about his maturity as a four-year college player at UCLA.
“He has a moxie; he has an experience level that you can feel that it transcends his age,” Spoelstra said. “He just makes winning plays.”
Lowry, the guy with the funny hat, is averaging 9.4 points, 4.1 assists and about one turnover per game. In addition to playing all those minutes, he remains a key contributor. Asked why Lowry remains such a key contributor on the Heat at this advanced stage of his career and with every box checked in terms of personal accomplishments (like a 2019 NBA championship), Lowry’s former coach Nick Nurse said Monday “because he can’t help himself.”
“When the ball goes up, man, deep down inside, he just competes,” added Nurse, the Raptors coach when Lowry became a championship point guard in Toronto. “I can’t tell you the amount of times that we talked about ‘We’re going to take you out here, we’re going to play you this amount of minutes,’ of this … and when the ball went up and the game got tough and we needed him out there, he wanted to be out there. He’d crash right through all those plans and keep on playing and keep making plays.”
And otherwise, the Heat are likely to continue plugging along, with a roster that does not excite all that many people outside of the organization, a roster that has been good enough to reach, or nearly reach, the last two NBA Finals.
Last season, before the NBA trade deadline, when the speculators and prognosticators were looking to the Nuggets to make upgrades to better surround then-MVP Nikola Jokić, Jokić was asked if he felt the Nuggets had “enough” to win. He said “I think so” and turned out to be right.
The Heat’s players are saying the same thing now.
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