The NBA will not fine or suspend Bam Adebayo for punching former teammate Tyler Herro in a Las Vegas gym, a league spokesperson told Joe Vardon of The Athletic on Thursday. “After discussing with the players involved and the NBPA,” the spokesperson said, “everyone would prefer to move on from this unfortunate circumstance, and no further action will be taken by the league.” The Miami Heat don’t plan to discipline their center either, per Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald.
The altercation happened the morning of July 10 inside a gym at Resorts World, where Adebayo confronted Herro over critical comments the guard had made on social media after the Giannis Antetokounmpo trade sent him to Milwaukee. According to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, the exchange turned physical when Adebayo took exception to Herro’s response, striking him in the chin area; Herro reportedly had to be held back from retaliating. Herro told Shelburne this week that he wants to move on and focus on his fresh start with the Bucks.
The league’s restraint has some logic behind it. The obvious precedents — Bobby Portis’s eight-game suspension for punching Nikola Mirotic in 2017, Draymond Green’s fine for punching Jordan Poole in 2022 — both involved teammates at team practices, and in both cases the league left discipline to the club. There is no clean precedent for an off-court, offseason fight between players on different teams, and with Herro declining to press the issue, the NBA chose not to invent one.
For Miami, the outcome closes an ugly subplot in an otherwise triumphant offseason — but it doesn’t erase it. This organization has marketed accountability for three decades, and its franchise center threw a punch at a 26-year-old former teammate two weeks after the front office traded him. That the victim plays for the team that just sent Miami its superstar only raises the stakes on Heat-Bucks meetings this season.
Fantasy managers can file this one away as noise: Adebayo faces no suspension, so his usual mid-round line of points, boards, and defensive stats is untouched, and Herro’s role as Milwaukee’s lead guard is a basketball question, not a disciplinary one. Neither player’s stock moves.
