The Damian Lillard sweepstakes continues around the league, with the Miami Heat expected to be a major player if a trade is eventually executed with the Portland Trail Blazers.
Most recently, a Blazers insider revealed the Heat’s current trade offer for Lillard, which reportedly includes three first-round picks, guard Tyler Herro, filler and possibly another young player. However, the Blazers apparently want quite a bit more than that.
The Trail Blazers should consider the Heat’s offer seriously as a new report from the Sun Sentinel‘s Ira Winderman revealed that Herro has only been seriously offered by the team for two players in the team’s history: Lillard and Kevin Durant.
“As for the perception of being dangled by the Heat as if expendable, Herro only has been offered, actually offered, for only two players since being drafted out of Kentucky in 2019: Kevin Durant and Lillard,” wrote Winderman. “As in two of the best players in the game today and two of the top 75 of all-time.”
It’s easy to understand why the Heat value Herro so much as he was the team’s third-leading scorer this past season with 20.1 points per game on 43.9 percent shooting from the field and 37.8 percent shooting from 3. He also recently won the Sixth Man of the Year award in the 2021-22 season.
This puts to rest the notion that the former University of Kentucky guard has been expendable. But the Heat may be overvaluing him if they seriously only offered him for Durant and Lillard.
Nonetheless, Lillard would undoubtedly launch the Heat into another stratosphere. The Heat ranked dead last in points per game last season and clearly needed another score-first player in the playoffs once Herro went down.
A seven-time All-Star and seven-time All-NBA guard, Lillard averaged a whopping 32.2 points per game last season for the Blazers on an efficient 46.3 percent from the field and 37.1 percent from deep. The Trail Blazers unfortunately finished the season 33-49 and missed the postseason entirely.
The Heat, on the other hand, made it all the way to the NBA Finals where they were knocked out in five games by the Denver Nuggets. Adding Lillard at the cost of some role players surely would’ve allowed them to put up a better fight against the eventual champs.
