The Heat Just Gave Tyler Herro A Shit Ton Of Money ($120+ Million) To Stay In Miami
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There's a chance with all the football on that this may have snuck by you, but the Miami Heat have decided to give Tyler Herro a shit ton of money. Whether you want to go off of the $120M number or $130M, either one is pretty staggering when you think of who we are talking about here. Once RJ Barrett sort of set the market with his 4/107M extension, all eyes then shifted over to the Heat and Herro. Once it became clear that they were not going to flip Herro for someone like Donovan Mitchell or another big name player this summer, they essentially had to pay him. As we just saw with Deandre Ayton, all it takes is once team with space to make a big offer in restricted free agency. You either pay more than maybe you want in order to match, or you lose the player for nothing. There's a reason Ayton is on the Suns right now, franchises don't exactly like losing good young players for nothing.
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With Jimmy Butler being 33 and Kyle Lowry being 36, a move like this is at the moment a commitment from MIA that Herro is part of their building moving forward. While I think this may have been an overpay, I get why MIA did it. It's not as if Herro stinks, he's arguably their second best offensive player
and yeah, $30M+ seems like a lot of money, but it won't always be that way. With the way the new deals are being talked about after the league gets all that sweet TV money, there will be 50, 60, 70M per year players. I think we all need to start bracing ourselves for what even average NBA players are going to be making. Plus, I also do not give a shit if the Heat make bad financial decisions. In fact, I encourage it. Give Lowry 90M, give Robinson 87M, give Herro 120M+, fine by me. This could be another Duncan Robinson situation for all we know where one day the Heat find themselves in a playoff series and they have nearly $50M on the bench because they can't defend and their shooting gets worse when defenses slow down.
At the same time, I wouldn't consider this deal to be untradable one day either. We've seen Russell Westbrook get traded on multiple occasions. John Wall got traded. Ben Simmons got traded. Contracts really aren't untradeable in today's NBA. If in a post-Jimmy Butler world with a team built around Bam and Herro it ends up working then around $30M will be a steal. When you factor in what the market initially was set at, the roster need Herro fills, and the fact that the team wasn't going to let Herro get to RFA, it's not all that surprising this is where they ended up.
If the Heat are going to compete this season, they'll need another really strong campaign from Herro. He may not make an All Star team, but he's going to have to provide another year of closer to All Star level production. One of those guys where if there's an injury you could see them voted in as a replacement. Now that he doesn't have to worry about his deal, you'd hope that would help his mentality entering the season.
They also just gave a young dude 120M+ guaranteed who just so happens to live in Miami, so there's a chance we don't see Tyler Herro for a week while he parties his face off.