How the Cavaliers took Tyler Herro out of Game 3 to put the Heat’s season on the brink
The Cleveland Cavaliers have shown little respect for Miami Heat guard Tyler Herro’s defense in this first-round playoff series. But the Cavaliers have shown a high level of respect for Herro’s offensive game.
With the Cavaliers winning the first two games of the series in Cleveland, the story from those contests became their offensive game plan aimed at Herro. The Cavaliers relentlessly hunted Herro’s defense to great success, with Cleveland guard Darius Garland describing the offensive strategy following Wednesday’s Game 2 victory as “pick on Tyler Herro and take care of the ball.”
But it was the Eastern Conference’s top-seeded Cavaliers’ stifling defense on Herro that became the story of their dominant 124-87 Game 3 win over the East’s eighth-seeded Heat on Saturday at Kaseya Center to take a commanding 3-0 lead in the best-of-7 playoff series.
“We did a good job on Tyler, just trying to limit his touches,” Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson said.
Not only did the Cavaliers limit Herro to a series-low 46 touches in Game 3, according to NBA tracking stats, but they also held Herro to series-lows in points (13), made field goals (5), field-goal attempts (13), three-point makes (1) and three-point attempts (3) on Saturday. For perspective, Herro had 55 touches in Game 1 and 80 touches in Game 2.
This comes after Herro scored a game-high 33 points in Game 2, averaging 27 points per game on 50 percent shooting from the field and 41.2 percent shooting on threes through the first two games of the series.
“He just had a monster game and what they just said was, ‘We’re going to do whatever we have to do to make sure that he doesn’t have that,’” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said of the Cavaliers’ defensive game plan against Herro in Game 3. “That’s born out of respect.”
From the beginning of Game 3, the Cavaliers top-locked (when a defender positions himself between the player they’re guarding and the screener to prevent the player they’re defending from trying to use the screen to get open) and face-guarded (when a defender stands directly in front and faces the offensive player whether he has the ball or not to make it difficult for them to be involved in the offense) Herro to keep the ball away from him.
As a result, Herro finished Saturday’s blowout loss with a series-low usage rate (an estimate of the percentage of team plays used by a player while on the court) of 22.1 percent.
“I’m coming off and they’re not allowing me to get any handoffs or coming off pindowns or anything like that,” Herro said, with the Heat hoping to bounce back and avoid the series sweep in Game 4 on Monday at Kaseya Center (7:30 p.m., TNT and FanDuel Sports Network Sun). “Just pretty much face-guardng me and guiding me into the corner.”
Whether it was Max Strus, Sam Merrill or Dean Wade defending Herro, they remained attached to him and kept him away from the Bam Adebayo handoffs that have become a staple of the Heat’s offense.
The Heat and Herro have seen this type of defense before, but the Cavaliers’ personnel makes it tough to beat. While the most common solution to top-locking is to take advantage of the defender’s positioning and make a backdoor cut to the basket for an easy layup or dunk, the Cavaliers usually have this season’s NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 6-foot-11 center Evan Mobley and/or 6-foot-9 center Jarrett Allen hanging around the paint waiting to help protect the rim.
“I think they do it best, honestly,” Herro said of the Cavaliers’ top-locking. “Just because the two bigs that they play, so they’re forcing me inside the arc before I even catch the ball. I’m catching the ball in the paint or under the three-point line and they have two bigs down there clogging up the paint.”
The Cavaliers also upped the ball pressure on Adebayo in Game 3, making his passes on backdoor cuts and other actions even harder to complete. Adebayo finished Saturday’s loss with a game-high six turnovers.
“I think raising our ball pressure level on Bam, that was part of it,” Atkinson said. “... I think they beat us with one back cut. If they beat us with the back cut, we’ll kind of live with it. Let’s not overreact to that. We just kind of stuck with the plan.”
With Herro unable to get to his usual spots, the Heat’s offense collapsed to finish Game 3 with just 87 points despite shooting 16 of 34 (47.1 percent) on threes. The Heat was held to just 30 paint points and committed 17 turnovers on Saturday.
“We rightly so have become reliant on Tyler creating a lot of offense for us,” Spoelstra said, “and they kind of took him out of his normal stuff with the face guarding and denying and that led to some of the discouragement.”
The Heat spent Sunday’s practice working to find counters to the way the Cavaliers are defending Herro.
“It’s really not a good defense to play,” Herro said following Sunday’s practice. ”As long as we can expose it, which we can. There’s ways to do it and that’s what we kind of worked on [Sunday] is picking different ways to kind of loosen up their defense a little bit.”
This all comes after the 25-year-old Herro put together the best regular season of his NBA career, averaging career-highs in points (23.9 points per game) and assists (5.5 per game) while shooting a career-best 47.2 percent from the field. He was also selected for his first NBA All-Star Game this season.
“That’s a sign of great respect — Tyler has earned that,” Spoelstra continued, regarding the defensive attention Herro is getting from Cavaliers. “He has absolutely earned that, that kind of respect. ... They’re denying him all over the place because they know how dangerous he can be.”
The Cavaliers also continue to make life difficult for Herro’s co-star by using Mobley to defend Adebayo for most of the game and sending extra defenders his way whenever he gets into the paint. This has led to Adebayo taking 17 threes and just eight shots at the rim through the first three games of the series.
“Bam creates so many triggers and opportunities for us,” Spoelstra said. “Especially when he catches it in the paint, they’re swarming.”
With Adebayo and Herro drawing so much attention from the Cavaliers’ defense, the Heat would benefit from an aggressive and effective Andrew Wiggins. But Wiggins has struggled to leave his mark on this series, totaling just 34 points on 11-of-31 (35.5 percent) shooting from the field through the first three games.
“He’s really important,” Spoelstra said of Wiggins. “He has to be assertive, he has to be aggressive. I have to do a better job of getting him in spots where he can really produce for us, and that’s the task over the next two days. He knows it, I know it, our team knows it. ... I have to do a better job of getting him in places where he can feel comfortable and aggressive.”
Wiggins was hard on himself after Game 3, stopping short of blaming his recent struggles on any lingering effects from the ankle or hamstring injuries that forced him to miss time toward the end of the regular season.
“It’s tough,” Wiggins said when asked if those injuries are still affecting him. “But no excuses. I’m out there on the court. If you’re out on the court, you’re 100 percent. That’s what it comes down to. I just got to do better.”
But it all comes back to Herro, who’s still learning what it’s like to be the No. 1 offensive option after the mid-season trade of Jimmy Butler to the Golden State Warriors.
“We’ll all get to work and that’s what Tyler always does,” Spoelstra said. “But this is playoff basketball. All the really good players have to go through this. You get schemed and the schemes are on steroids in the playoffs. He’ll respond.”
This story was originally published April 27, 2025 at 10:10 AM.
