Wes Goldberg

But I understand also Spoh's decision to bring him off the bench.

He's been, like you said, unavailable all season long, had played only 10 or 11 games up until his return back from a rib injury where apparently he fractured several ribs and just...

Nobody told the media down here that that had happened until he was coming back.

And you're like, all right, cool.

But he comes back, and I understand Spoh just saying, like, this guy hasn't really been available.

We're kind of too late in the game to really re-acclimate him to a brand-new offense that he had barely played in, right?

Like, Tyler Hero is a ball-screen guy.

He does most of his damage in pick-and-roll and against drop coverage coming off screens.

And for that not to be there, I...

it would have been an adjustment for him regardless.

And, and maybe there's just not enough runway now, you know, at the time he returned with 26 games left in the season, maybe just not enough runway for him to get in it, but he's been playing well.

Like at the end of the day, he's a bucket getter.

And you saw that in the fourth quarter, he had that big three with two and a half minutes to go to actually put the heat up by one.

The problem is that he did not score for the rest of the game after that, and Philly ended on an 8-0 run.

But in terms of Hero's place, I think we're going to continue to see him off the bench.

Now, unless, obviously, Powell and the groin injury that he exited with ends up being a multi-game thing, then Hero will just go step into Norm's spot in the starting lineup.

But the Heat want to be a defensive first team.

I think there's concerns about what they can be defensively if you've got Hero, Powell, and Powell-Larson starting.

And Larson's not a bad defender, but he does get picked on by bigger players sometimes.

And so that's what they're going to do.