The Miami Heat were wise to sidestep the Bradley Beal saga, which finally resolved itself Wednesday with him reaching a buyout agreement with the Phoenix Suns and agreeing to join the Los Angeles Clippers, as ESPN’s Shams Charania reported. There was a time in which Beal might’ve been a realistic candidate to help with the Heat’s offensive issues, but that clearly wasn’t now.
What the Heat really don’t need, though, is to create the NBA’s next disaster contract with Tyler Herro. An offense-only, score-first guard like Beal, Herro has not and will not transform this team, much the same way Beal couldn’t lay the foundation for the Washington Wizards or complete the hastily assembled championship puzzle for the Suns.
Herro is still worth having at the proverbial right price, but as the Suns just saw—and as the Wizards learned before them—attaching a cap-crushing contract to this kind of player is a first-class ticket to nowhere.
Mishandling Herro’s contract extension would hamstring the Heat for years to come.
Score-first guards who aren’t primary playmakers have perhaps never been less valued by this league. Beal was bought-out, Jordan Poole has basically been salary-dumped twice (both coming into and exiting Washington), CJ McCollum was discarded in the most recent Poole deal, Zach LaVine’s trade value had tanked by the time the Chicago Bulls got around to trading him—you get the idea.
Hopefully, the Heat keep all of this mind when meeting Herro and his representatives at the negotiating table this offseason. The 2024-25 first-time All-Star is eligible to sign a three-year, $149.7 million extension as of Oct. 1, or, if nothing is signed now, a four-year, $206.9 million extension during the 2026 offseason.
A $50 million annual salary should be attached to superstars and superstars only—yes, even in this NBA economy. Herro is clearly a gifted offensive player (as is Beal), but he’s nowhere near a needle-mover of that magnitude.
For his career, the Heat have fared a whopping 0.3 points better per 100 possessions with him than without, per Basketball-Reference. Even this past season (his best to date by far), that number was a good-not-great plus-2.3. And we all saw what happened during his first playoff test as a load-bearing featured player on offense: 17.8 points on 41.5/31/80 shooting and 2.8 assists against 2.3 turnovers during Miami’s four-game loss to a Cleveland Cavaliers team that played half the series without Darius Garland.
Herro is good. Good players are worth keeping around. But he’s not great. And if the Heat pay him as if he is, then they’re going to be just as lost as Phoenix and Washington once were.
Granted, the Heat’s front office is too smart to grant Herro the no-trade clause that the Wizards once inexplicably gave Beal, but Herro may not be much easier to move if he winds up with an obviously bloated contract. Given how lofty this organization’s goals are for the future, the last thing this franchise can afford to do is torpedo its own flexibility.
To reiterate, this doesn’t mean Miami should avoid paying him or should be hastily shopping him around. Yet, if the Heat overcommits to him, their future will look bleak, and they’ll have no one else to blame. They were linked with Beal far too often to not have noticed just how disastrous that situation became when he signed a deal he was never going to live up to.
