Heat’s Tyler Herro claims Celtics shut him down in Game 3 by ‘holding me, jersey’

Herro would finish with 15 points off of only making five shots out of his 16 attempts and from the three-point line, he made three out of nine attempts. He would cite the Celtics for taking the Heat “out of our offense” especially in the first half where that side of the ball was a slog as they shot poorly and committed mistakes.

“I thought they picked up the pressure, tried to speed us up, take us out of our offense, extend our catches,” Herro said of the Celtics’ defense on the star guard Saturday night. “I thought they did a good job of that, especially in that first half. We were moving too fast and not taking our time. It wasn’t the same offensive outlook that we had in the second game in the series.”

How the Celtics halted Herro’s play-making ability

Even when the scoring might not be efficient for Herro, his play making has been an underrated development this season for the 24-year old guard. However, he was only held to two assists Saturday night as the University of Kentucky product explained what the Celtics did on that front that got them uncomfortable.

“I mean, they’re still protecting the paint it felt like. They did a couple of different adjustments,” Herro said. “When Jrue [Holiday] wasn’t guarding me, just randomly coming over and picking up the ball, make the ball get out of my hands, but we have a bunch of guys on this team that can continue to hurt them from from three or driving. It feel like we need to watch the film where we can figure out a way to generate those three-point looks with the defense that they’re playing.”

On the season overall, Herro has been averaging 20.8 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 4.5 assists per game while shooting 44.1 percent from the field. He has been used as the main offensive creator for the Heat due to the injuries of not only their best player in Jimmy Butler, but also Terry Rozier who is set to miss his 10th straight game Monday.

Spoelstra assesses how the Celtics maintained Herro and the Heat 

As said before, he excelled in that role in Game 2 as he was great in every aspect, but his streakiness came back and hurt Miami, despite Herro not being the only reason why they lost the game. Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra spoke about how the Celtics stopped Herro in his tracks and hindered his play-making opportunities.

“They stayed at home a little bit more on the shooters but it also depends like if we execute executed with a little bit more intention, if it ever loosened up, we won’t know that answer necessarily,” Spoelstra said. “Once they started bullying us and biting us and getting us out of any kind of trigger or action that there was, it was easy to flatten this out at that point. Nobody was open. We were left the end of possession with just going one on one or dribbling through against all their size.”

If there has been a constant trend throughout this series, victories have gone to the teams with the better start and Game 3 proved that once again. In Game 1, the Celtics started on a 14-0 run and never looked back, then Game 2 saw the Heat catch fire from three-point range draining eight leading to 23 in the whole game which is a playoff record.

Herro says the way Miami have started games have “hurt” them

This time around, Miami had a frustrating large amount of missed opportunities to make this game close or even take the lead but they would either miss an open look or commit five turnovers leading to 10 Celtics points in the first quarter. It sets the tone for the rest of the outing as Herro said to ClutchPoints that the way Miami begins “have definitely hurt us.”

“Our starts have definitely hurt us,” Herro said. “I thought in the first game, it obviously started with the offensive rebound and set the tone and then tonight you know there was a couple of different times the balls in the air or on the floor and we didn’t at least put the right effort to come up with those.”

“Obviously they crashed the glasses harder, they sent four guys,” Herro continued. “You know when when a team like that sees that they have a a weakness of not boxing out they’re gonna continue to do that and that kind of sets the tone for the rest of the game. So definitely getting off to better stars and I think it starts with you know those balls when the balls in the air and the balls on the floor, we have to come up with those up and that’s a big you know tone setter throughout this series.”

Boston is now in the driver’s seat, taking a 2-1 series lead with a chance to make the upset seem more unlikely, winning both games in Miami. The Heat look to avoid that as Game 4 inside the Kaseya Center will be Monday night as they look to make this a competitive series.