The Miami Heat officially landed Giannis Antetokounmpo after the Bucks shipped him and Bobby Portis over in a blockbuster. The cost was steep. Tyler Herro, Kel’el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis, the No. 13 pick in Nate Ament, first-rounders in 2031 and 2033, a 2030 first-round swap, and a 2033 second-rounder all went the other way.
That’s a serious chunk of organizational depth to surrender in one swing, even for a player of Giannis’ caliber. He’s locked in for $58.5 million in 2026-27 with a $62.8 million player option the year after, so this isn’t a rental, and the Heat must find outside-shooting pieces carefully.
Miami already started patching the roster by inking Tim Hardaway Jr. to a one-year, $6.5 million deal, a smart bit of business. Hardaway put up 13.5 points, 2.6 rebounds, and 1.4 assists with the Nuggets last season, connecting on 44.7% of his shots overall and 40.7% from deep.
He led every reserve in the league with 205 made threes and finished third in Sixth Man of the Year voting. That’s precisely the shooting archetype a Giannis-Bam pairing needs surrounding it.
One shooter won’t be enough, though. The Heat also watched Norman Powell walk, agreeing to a two-year, $45.0 million deal with the Bulls after a breakout, first-time All-Star campaign of 21.7 points, 3.5 rebounds, and 2.5 assists. That loss stings in a specific way, because Powell was the roster’s best option for a self-made bucket.
Strip away Herro and Powell in the same offseason, and suddenly Miami has no natural sixth man capable of walking in cold and generating 12 points on his own.
The bench was not bad at all on paper last season. But the roster has shifted dramatically since then. The Heat finished 43-39, 10th in the East, and ranked 13th in offensive rating, 13th defensively, and 11th from three-point range. A middle-of-the-pack profile, and now the shot creation just took another hit.
That’s exactly why the next move should be cheap scoring punch, a bench spark plug: someone who fires from deep without blinking, has a bit of pull-up confidence, and can survive stretches away from Giannis without the offense grinding to a halt.
Hardaway brings the shooting, Portis brings scoring punch as a big man, and Andrew Wiggins can still stretch the floor, but this team still needs a guard or wing capable of attacking a second unit to his will.
Here are five affordable scorers the Heat should be circling.
5. Seth Curry
The lowest-volume name on this list also happens to be the purest shooter available, which makes him worth a look regardless. Not every bench scorer needs to dribble the entire possession. Sometimes the smartest move is simply adding a shooter defenses are terrified to help off of, one pass away from Giannis.
Seth Curry barely saw the floor with the Warriors last season, logging just 10 appearances, yet the shooting numbers stayed absurd. He averaged 7.1 points, 1.2 rebounds, and 1.0 assists in only 13.3 minutes a night, hitting 49.0% from the field, 48.0% from deep, and 91.7% at the line. His true shooting percentage sat at a ridiculous 65.4%, small sample or not, and that’s just who Curry is at this point. Across 560 career regular-season games, he’s shooting 43.3% from three with a 60.6% true shooting mark.
Scale that production up, and the pitch gets even stronger: 7.1 points in 13.3 minutes translates to 19.2 points per 36, all without needing a single play drawn up for him. That’s the entire case in one sentence. Curry isn’t becoming Miami’s sixth man, he won’t be initiating offense, and asking him to guard elite wings would be malpractice. But if Erik Spoelstra needs ten minutes of spacing around Giannis, Bam Adebayo, Portis or Wiggins, Curry can help in ways few players his size can.
The concerns write themselves. He’s 35, undersized, and offers little on the defensive end. The Heat can’t hide him in every matchup, particularly against bigger backcourts, and he doesn’t add anything toward rim pressure, which is why he lands at the bottom of this list rather than higher.
The money makes this an easy call regardless. Curry is coming off a $2.8 million salary in Golden State, exactly the kind of number the Heat should be attacking after committing $6.5 million to Hardaway and losing Powell’s production for nothing in return.
4. Gary Trent Jr.
The raw numbers undersell how useful this fit could be. Gary Trent Jr’s 2025-26 with the Bucks wasn’t pretty on paper, 8.1 points, 1.0 rebounds, and 1.2 assists in 21.2 minutes, and the efficiency lagged too, at 38.7% from the field, 36.0% from three, and a 53.3% true shooting mark. But this is one of those cases where prototype matters more than the full stat line. He still fired 5.3 threes a night and knocked down 1.9 of them.
Stretch that out over a full workload and it translates to roughly 9.0 three-point attempts per 36 minutes, which is a genuinely valuable number next to Giannis. Miami needs players who don’t think twice before letting it fly, and Trent has never been a hesitant shooter.
His larger body of work only strengthens the case. Trent is a career 38.7% shooter from three across eight NBA seasons, with stretches in Toronto scoring 18.3 points a night while generating 1.7 steals per game defensively. Nobody’s expecting that version to reappear in a Heat uniform, but Miami doesn’t need it to. They just need a bench wing capable of making threes in bulk.
There’s real buy-low value after Trent declined his $3.9 million player option in Milwaukee, according to Eric Nehm of The Athletic. This isn’t a $15 million ask. It’s a short-term, prove-it type of contract, maybe an exception-level deal, which matters plenty for a Heat team that’s shooting-needy but cash-strapped.
Just don’t mistake him for a full-blown creator. He can get to a handful of pull-ups, and he can go for 20 on a hot night, but running actual bench offense the way Herro once did isn’t in his skill set. His assist numbers are minimal, and his shot selection can go cold in a hurry. Still, as an inexpensive shooting guard who complements Giannis and Adebayo, he’s one of the more logical targets left on the board.
3. Jordan Clarkson
Last season wasn’t the typical scoring output Jordan Clarkson can produce. He averaged 8.6 points, 1.8 rebounds, and 1.3 assists with the Knicks, shooting 45.1% overall and 32.7% from deep, a career-low scoring campaign that came with a shrinking role in the playoffs too, just 4.9 points, 1.7 rebounds, and 0.6 assists across 18 postseason games. He did walk away with his first championship ring, though, for whatever that’s worth to a player weighing his next move.
That diminished role could actually work in the Heat’s favor financially. He signed for just $3.6 million with the Knicks last year, and he’s still an unrestricted free agent. He’s already banked plenty of money, already won Sixth Man of the Year back in 2020-21, and already has a title. At this stage of a career, a clearly defined role next to Giannis might carry more appeal than chasing an extra million or two on a lottery roster.
The numbers over a full career tell a different story than last season alone. He’s a 15.3-point-per-game career scorer, with individual seasons of 20.8, 16.0, 16.2, 20.8, and 17.1 points scattered across the years since 2018-19. Being deployed in a smaller role in New York doesn’t make him washed.
He’d offer Miami a different flavor entirely from Hardaway, who thrives as a movement shooter and quick-trigger floor spacer. This is more of a dribble-scorer who can soak up possessions on his own, and given that Giannis can’t be asked to create every half-court bucket, or that Bam Adebayo shouldn’t be leaned on as a primary creator, Clarkson could have a big role once again in his career.
The downside is what it’s always been with him. Tunnel vision creeps in at times, defense has never been the strength, and the three-point shooting has been inconsistent year to year. Miami would need to keep the role disciplined. As an eighth man rather than a fourth option, this works fine.
2. Cam Thomas
Nobody on this list scores with the same explosiveness as Cam Thomas, and it isn’t particularly close. The reason he doesn’t top the rankings comes down to fit and trust rather than talent. His game is built to score first, score again, and maybe think about passing as a distant third option. That approach can get you cut on the wrong roster. On this particular Heat team, though, that scoring arrogance might be precisely the missing ingredient.
His 2025-26 season took a strange path, starting in Brooklyn, landing briefly in Milwaukee, and ending with a March waiver from the Bucks, becoming a free agent without a team ever since.
Across the full season sample, Thomas ended at 13.5 points in 21.0 minutes a night, shooting 40.9% from the field. The advanced numbers are where things get loud: a 30.2% usage rate, 52.7% true shooting, 46.1% effective field goal percentage, a 38.0% three-point attempt rate, and a 35.1% free-throw rate.
That usage number tells the whole story by itself. He doesn’t wait for permission to shoot, and he doesn’t need a well-run offense to get his. Tough pull-ups, trips to the free-throw line, closeout attacks, dead possessions turned into points, all of it is in his toolbox.
Miami just lost Herro, who scored 23.9 points a game two seasons back and served as the team’s primary guard scorer for years. This isn’t a straight-up swap, but it’s a much cheaper way to recover a slice of that shot creation.
His recent scoring history separates him from the typical bargain free agent, too. He averaged 22.5 points across 66 games in 2023-24 and 24.0 points in an injury-shortened 2024-25, as hamstring trouble limited him to just 25 appearances that year. The volume was still loud whenever he suited up. That kind of recent production rarely comes this cheap, but a rough market and multiple team changes have a way of resetting a player’s price tag.
The Heat sit among the rare teams where this particular bet makes sense. Giannis and Bam provide the defensive floor. Hardaway and Wiggins can space the floor around him in bench units. Spoelstra can keep his job description simple: score, attack second units, skip the point guard duties. If it clicks, this becomes the best value add of the entire group.
1. Bradley Beal
If the medical reports come back even remotely clean, Bradley Beal is the scorer the Heat should be chasing hardest. The name still carries more weight than the recent production, sure, but the basketball case isn’t dead. It’s just buried under injuries, shifting roles, and a genuinely brutal season in Los Angeles.
He declined his $5.6 million player option with the Clippers and hit unrestricted free agency after appearing in just six games last season. He underwent season-ending surgery for a hip fracture, and his 2025-26 line was a modest 8.2 points, 0.8 rebounds, and 1.7 assists. Rough numbers, especially for someone who once lived comfortably in 30-point territory across back-to-back seasons.
But it’s the season before that one that should still draw Miami’s interest. In 2024-25 with the Suns, he averaged 17.0 points, 3.3 rebounds, and 3.7 assists on 49.7% shooting overall, 38.6% from three, with a 59.8% true shooting mark. That’s not superstar-level production anymore, but it’s genuinely strong third-option scoring efficiency. Land that version on a cheap deal, and the entire bench and closing-lineup conversation shifts.
The fit alongside Giannis makes more sense than it might first appear. He offers enough off-ball shooting to punish helping defenders, but he’s far more than a stationary catch-and-shoot option. He can attack a scrambling defense, run a bit of secondary pick-and-roll, work the mid-range, and generate offense when the first action dies. Miami needs exactly that, since Giannis and Bam together will collapse defenses into the paint constantly. Somebody has to convert those rotations into open threes, floaters, and quick drives to the rim.
The financial picture keeps this realistic, too. He signed a two-year, $11.0 million deal with the Clippers last July following his Suns buyout, and star money isn’t on the table anymore, not after six games and hip surgery. A $5.0 million figure would make sense for him, right in the range Miami should be willing to spend.
The risk here outweighs anyone else on this list, no question. He has to prove he can move well, defend at an acceptable level, and accept a diminished role without needing the ball on every possession. He shouldn’t be brought in as any kind of savior, either. Miami already has its superstar in Giannis, its anchor in Bam, and its shooting boost in Hardaway and Wiggins. This would be the scoring swing that raises the ceiling, assuming the body cooperates.
