The NBA officially closed the book on the Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro drama Wednesday, and the ruling was simple. Neither player will face any discipline for their July altercation.
Adam Silver’s office released a short statement saying the league investigated the incident, reviewed the accounts from both sides, and determined no further action was warranted.
Translation: The NBA is done babysitting.
The Heat teammates got into a heated exchange at a private event that reportedly escalated to some minor pushing and shoving. The details leaked over the following days, with reports suggesting the fight started over comments Herro made about Bam’s leadership after their disappointing playoff run.
Look, the league made the right call here. This did not happen on the court. Nobody threw a real punch. Nothing rose to the level of an actual assault. Fining or suspending two grown men for a verbal blow-up at a party would have set a weird precedent.
The Heat still have a mess to clean up. Adebayo and Herro are supposed to be the two cornerstones of the post-Jimmy Butler era. Instead, they are the two guys who cannot be in the same room without security getting involved.
Miami reportedly considered trading Herro before the Giannis Antetokounmpo deal came together. Then he got shipped to Milwaukee anyway. So this particular soap opera is moot for Heat fans. It is now the Bucks problem.
But for the NBA, the message is important. The league does not want to be in the business of policing every offseason argument between teammates. If a player crosses a line during a game, that gets punished. If a player does something that damages the league public image in a real way, that gets punished. A shoving match at a party where nobody got hurt? Not their job.
The insiders who proposed wild ideas about how to settle the beef, including one who floated a public one-on-one game as a resolution, can go back to their day jobs. The NBA is not staging pay-per-view teammate fights. Not this year, anyway.
For Herro, this ends the situation quietly right before he starts his new life in Milwaukee. The Bucks needed a shooting guard, and now they have one who has proven he can put up big scoring nights. The Heat drama fades to the background.
For Bam, this closes a rough offseason. He lost his running mate in the Giannis trade, then dealt with the fallout of the Herro incident, then had to sit through Karl-Anthony Towns taking a shot at his coaching staff at the ESPYs. Now he can focus on being the anchor of a new-look Heat team.
The whole saga was mostly just embarrassing. And the NBA is basically saying that embarrassment is punishment enough.
Erik Spoelstra will spin this as a family matter that stays inside the building. Fans will forget about it by opening night. And the next time two teammates get into it, we will do this whole song and dance again.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
