After the typically frenzied sprint from playoffs to draft to free agency to summer league, the NBA is now, finally, on vacation—or at least it would be if not for the Damian Lillard–shaped cloud still hanging over the horizon.

The leading scorer in Portland Trail Blazers history requested a trade more than a month ago, which means that for more than a month, the Miami Heat have tried and failed to pry the seven-time All-NBA honoree out of the Pacific Northwest with a trade. Miami’s offer is clear, and has been that entire time: multiple first-round picks, contracts to match Lillard’s hefty contract, and Tyler Herro, who would be spun off to a third team to bolster Portland’s pick package. With young cornerstones Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe, and Anfernee Simons in the fold, Portland has little need for another guard.

The Offer Sheet

Will Portland finally give in and trade Dame Lillard? We’re keeping a close watch on all of the biggest free agents, trade targets, retirement bluffers, and more in our new offseason tracker.

In other words, the prospective blockbuster might hinge on Herro, and whether the extra juice he’d add to the deal is sufficient for Portland’s liking. Even a team in no rush to trade its star, as Portland professes, would find it hard to turn down a massive offer of, say, three of the Heat’s own first-round picks plus two more from another team.

So just how good is Herro? Last summer, ESPN’s Zach Lowe wrote that the Miami guard is “perhaps the most polarizing high-wattage player in the NBA. He has reached this strange point just as he becomes the key veteran in any potential Miami Heat trade package for Kevin Durant, Donovan Mitchell, or whichever star becomes available next.”

That “next” available star is Lillard—but a year later, it seems more clear that Herro doesn’t have the upside to move the needle in a superstar trade. Or at least, if he did, Lillard would have taken his talents to South Beach already.

For Herro’s believers, the 2022-23 season provided more evidence of his potential, as he returned to the starting lineup following Sixth Man of the Year honors in 2021-22. Yet at the same time, for his detractors, Herro’s fourth NBA season further exposed his limitations as a two-way player—and that was true even before the Heat maneuvered a shocking run to the Finals with Herro on the bench, waylaid by a broken hand early in their first playoff game.

The bird’s-eye view of Herro’s present and future outlook remains the same as before last season. It’s easy to believe in a player who boasts such a rare blend of youth and productivity. Last season, Herro averaged 20 points, five rebounds, and four assists per game at the age of 23. Every other player this century who met those criteria was a superstar. In chronological order: Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Chris Paul, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, Jayson Tatum, Ja Morant, and Luka Doncic.

Herro is also a historically prolific long-range shooter. Only three other NBA players have averaged at least 2.5 made 3s per game through their age-23 season, like Herro has (minimum 200 games): Trae Young, Anthony Edwards, and Luka. He’s shot well in clutch situations, too, for whatever predictive value that limited sample provides.

Like all good fun facts, those stats lie a little bit—there are definite era effects that benefit Herro, and he barely surpasses the 20/5/4 marks—but they still point to prodigious potential. Look at the other names on that statistical comp list again! 

But Herro’s demerits are more nuanced, and worth teasing out in full, to help explain why his value is so hard to pin down. First, his scoring isn’t nearly as stellar as his overall numbers, and his silky shooting stroke, suggest. A lack of explosiveness means Herro barely gets to the rim (16th percentile in rim rate last season, per Cleaning the Glass); instead, he takes a lot of midrange jumpers (86th percentile). Out of 180 players who attempted at least 500 shots last season, per Second Spectrum, Herro had the 16th-hardest shot quality, in the neighborhood of lead guards like Luka, De’Aaron Fox, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

Herro isn’t at their level as a scorer, however, so a difficult shot diet means his efficiency suffers. And that efficiency looks even worse when accounting for his lack of free throws, which stems from his jumper-heavy approach. Out of 53 qualified players with a 25 percent or higher usage rate last season, Herro ranked 52nd in free throw attempt rate, ahead of only Klay Thompson.

Those factors mean that in every season of his NBA career thus far, Herro has rated slightly below the league average in both effective field goal percentage and true shooting percentage. Lillard, by contrast, has been above average—in many cases well above average—in true shooting percentage in every healthy season of his career; Tyrese Maxey, a common if controversial comp for Herro over the last month, has also been comfortably above average in each of the last two seasons.

While Herro’s own output therefore suffers, he also hasn’t displayed tremendous playmaking potential. He’s a decent passer who collects a decent number of assists in Miami’s egalitarian offensive system. But he’s not a great passer, and he often bites off more than he can chew with ambitious attempts that don’t meet their intended targets.

Over the last two seasons, Herro’s tallied only 1.6 assists for every turnover. That ratio ranks 60th out of 66 players with 500-plus assists over that span. That ranking isn’t a disaster by itself; 58th through 62nd on that list is, in order: Zach LaVine, Kevin Durant, Herro, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Jayson Tatum. But it’s still a negative—I’ve written before about the problems that the Bulls and Celtics face because neither LaVine nor Tatum is a top-tier creator for teammates—and at least those stars compensate for their wayward playmaking with top-flight scoring.  

(Maxey, by comparison, ranks 10th in assist-to-turnover rate among this group, which hints at much greater creative potential if the 22-year-old 76er ever assumes full point guard duties. Maxey has also made 43 percent of his 3s over the past two seasons, which places him second among all players with at least 500 attempts in that span, and which means he’s even better than Herro at Herro’s best NBA skill. With apologies to Heat brass and Dan Le Batard, there’s a chasm between the two young guards’ offensive skill sets.)

Incidentally, while Herro is perhaps overrated offensively because of his deficiencies in these more subtle areas, the reverse is why Jimmy Butler, his teammate, is often underrated in the regular season. Butler excels in these overlooked stats: He largely avoids turnovers and has the highest free throw attempt rate of any high-usage player in the league.

Butler is also a lockdown defender, which is where Herro’s largest limitation reveals itself. It’s not Herro’s fault, really, that he’s not a better defender; he just doesn’t have the body for it.

At the 2019 draft combine, Herro’s wingspan measured 1.25 inches shorter than his height. The vast majority of NBA players have the opposite relationship, with a wingspan longer than their height. In fact, out of more than 1,500 players with combine measurements this century, according to an analysis of NBA Advanced Stats data, only three players had a worse height-minus-wingspan mark than Herro: Martynas Andriuskevicius, Jon Scheyer, and Svi Mykhailiuk. That’s not particularly great company. And other than maybe Mason Plumlee, none of the 17 players on record with a larger height than wingspan developed into positive NBA defenders.

Herro isn’t notably improving as a defender even as he gains NBA experience, and even as the Heat continue to place him on opposing teams’ weakest offensive players and hide him with switches when possible. One measure of pure defensive ability is how well a player defends isolations, and in that stat, Herro’s ranked near the bottom of the league in each of the past three seasons.

Since 2020, Herro’s allowed 1.10 points per possession when defending an isolation, according to Second Spectrum, which ranks 141st out of 144 players with at least 300 isos defended in that span. Only teammate Duncan Robinson, Terry Rozier, and Tim Hardaway Jr. were worse.

Herro has self-evident, desirable NBA skills, and he will be a productive player for a long time. But it’s important to segment out his flaws in this fashion because, from a team-building perspective, they might crash a firm ceiling on top of his, and his team’s, potential. 

Here’s a theory of guard play in the NBA: To be a leading force on a contender, a guard must fit into one of three groups. Ideally, he is his team’s primary scorer and MVP candidate—but if not, he must be able to either create for his teammates at an elite level or capably defend players from the first class.

Notable guards from recent champions and runners-up exemplify this rough classification system. Steph Curry and Devin Booker are in the first group. Jamal Murray and Chris Paul are (or were, in the aging Paul’s case) in the second. Jrue Holiday and Marcus Smart are in the third.

Given his athletic limitations and inefficient scoring, Herro will never rise to a near-MVP level or serve as the lead option on a team with championship aspirations. That’s why the Heat want Lillard instead of him; as last season (and postseason, after Butler cooled off) demonstrated, Miami needs an offensive upgrade that Herro probably can’t provide.

But where does that leave Herro? He’s nowhere near the passer that Paul, or younger players in that second category like Tyrese Haliburton or Darius Garland, are. Nor is he a lockdown defender in the Holiday mold.

Advanced stats largely agree on his present-day value, and portray him closer to an average starter than an All-Star. To be fair, Herro is still young, with room to improve; it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him boost his scoring average from 20 points per game closer to 25 in his peak years. Yet even if Herro, say, leans further into his catch-and-shoot ability to boost his offensive efficiency—in his piece last year, Zach Lowe suggested Klay Thompson as an aspirational model for Herro—the reality that he’ll remain a defensive liability for his entire career means he’ll always run into the same fit issues that plague him now. Peak Klay was so valuable for the Warriors because he was a stalwart defender in addition to being the second-greatest shooter in NBA history.

Because Herro doesn’t fit into any of those three archetypal guard roles, a team that wants to win with him as one of its highest-paid players—his four-year, $120 million extension starts this season—must pair him with a backcourt partner who can both run the offense and defend the opposing team’s best guard. 

That’s what the Bulls tried to do when they acquired Lonzo Ball to pair with LaVine, who’s like a much more efficient and explosive version of Herro, with similar playmaking and defensive limitations—but there aren’t many flexible Ball-type guards to go around. Sure, Herro would slot perfectly in the Grayson Allen role in Milwaukee, with Holiday as his backcourt crutch, but the Bucks have no recourse to trade for Herro or afford his salary. 

Conversely, Herro wouldn’t be a strong match for Brooklyn, which is viewed as a likely destination for him in three-team configurations. At first blush, the rebuilding Nets could use his offense because they don’t yet have any so-called guards of the future on their roster—but that blank slate means that acquiring Herro could actually limit their future flexibility, because he requires such a specialized backcourt partner. Nor would Herro slide in comfortably alongside most contending rosters, who already have one strong scoring guard—for instance, Maxey in Philadelphia or Jalen Brunson in New York—but can’t handle another poor, small defender.  

Viewed through this lens, the Heat are actually the ideal team for Herro’s skill set. They traded for Kyle Lowry, who theoretically would have worked next to Herro if only he’d been a couple of years younger. They have Butler and Bam Adebayo to both help run the offense and support Herro defensively. They prosper with Erik Spoelstra’s coaching wizardry.

And they also just reached the Finals without him, which perhaps adds the final piece to the puzzle of why other teams have seemingly soured on the prospect of acquiring Herro and paving the way for Lillard to join the Heat. Note that every stat referenced in this piece thus far—even the lackluster bunch—is regular-season-only, which is to Herro’s benefit because his playoff numbers are much worse.

Since his initial breakout as a rookie during Miami’s run to the bubble Finals, Herro has frankly been terrible in the postseason. He scored just nine points per game in the Heat’s first-round sweep at the hands of the Bucks in 2021; he never found a rhythm in the 2022 playoffs, as the Heat reached the conference finals (where he was ultimately injured) in spite of his poor play; and he watched his teammates improve immensely while he sat on the bench in street clothes in 2023.

Over the past three postseasons—or since the bubble, which inflated shooting accuracy—Herro has averaged only 11.9 points, 3.7 rebounds, and 2.6 assists per game, while shooting just 40 percent from the field and 26 percent from distance. Out of 38 high-usage players in that span, Herro ranks 36th in playoff PER, ahead of only a pair of infamous playoff underperformers, Julius Randle and Dillon Brooks.

That dismal showing might be small-sample noise, as Herro’s shot abandoned him for a few weeks in 2022. The result still isn’t pretty—out of 88 players who have attempted at least 75 3-pointers over the past three postseasons, Herro ranks 87th in accuracy, ahead of only Giannis—but it doesn’t mean Herro is doomed forever.

Yet Herro’s defensive weakness and fit issues mean he might always struggle to play at his best in the postseason, particularly if he’s a focal point for opponents. The Heat might not have reached the 2023 Finals if not for Herro’s injury, which meant less heralded players like Gabe Vincent could shore up Miami’s defense while mostly backfilling his offensive production. (Of course, once the Finals arrived, Miami needed Herro’s superior offense once again—but the Nuggets’ high-octane attack would have destroyed him on the other end.)

In theory, Herro’s polarizing game should work to the Heat’s ultimate advantage in trade talks. They don’t need the Blazers to believe in Herro; they just need one team out of the other 28 to believe in Herro enough to send a couple of future picks for him, which would allow Miami to work them into a three-team megadeal.

But for now, at least, Herro remains just on the verge of being enough, in so many respects. He’s close to being a primary scorer, but he’s just not quite efficient enough. He’s close to being a modern point guard, but he’s just not quite dynamic enough. He’s close to being a leader of a contender, but he’s just not quite well rounded enough. And he’s close to being a centerpiece of this summer’s biggest NBA blockbuster—but thus far, it appears he’s just not quite enticing enough.

Zach Kram

Zach writes about basketball, baseball, and assorted pop culture topics.