The Miami Heat, without three key players, prevented the Milwaukee Bucks from winning their third straight game with a 123-97 victory Tuesday night at Fiserv Forum.

Despite not having star Jimmy Butler, starting guard Terry Rozier and key reserve Josh Richardson the Heat (29-25) saw five players reach double figures and scored 35 points off Bucks turnovers to win for the fifth time in their last seven games.

The Bucks (35-20) have not won three in a row since Jan. 20-24.

Milwaukee heads to Memphis on Thursday for its last game before the all-star break.

Bucks head coach Doc Rivers pulled his starters down 29 points with 7 minutes, 40 seconds to go in the game. Giannis Antetokounmpo finished with 23 points on 11-of-18 shooting. He also had 11 rebounds, eight rebounds and two blocks.

Damian Lillard, Malik Beasley and Bobby Portis had 16 each. Jae Crowder, starting in place of an injured Khris Middleton, had two points on 1-of-1 shooting in 18 minutes. Brook Lopez had seven points, three bounds and a block.

Greenfield native Tyler Herro had 19 points and five assists for the Heat while Nikola Jović led the team with 24. Duncan Robinson had 23 and Bam Adebayo added 16 while Kevin Love came off the bench to hit 5 three-pointers and score 19 points. Jaimie Jacquez Jr. also had a dozen off the bench.

Heat get moving, leads to hot shooting

Miami put pressure on Milwaukee’s halfcourt defense throughout the first half by constantly running around the perimeter and forcing them to not only chase but fight over screens. And, even if a Bucks defender stayed close the Heat skipped the ball around to find an open shooter, and the result was a 60% shooting mark from behind the three-point line (12 for 20) before a heave by Herro at the buzzer.

Robison was 5 for 6, Jović was a season-best 4 for 5 and Herro went 3 for 5 from distance to help stake the Heat a 69-52 lead at the break.

“They move without the ball, they share the ball, that’s how they play,” Rivers said. “We didn’t handle that very well. We’ll fix that.”

Adebayo then took advantage of that spacing by going 6 for 10 for 14 points – 12 of which came in the paint.

Miami maintained that activity on the defensive side of the ball, too, which allowed it to take advantage of eight Milwaukee turnovers to score 12 points.

Now, not all of those were “forced” by Miami – like Patrick Beverley delivering a pass to Lopez’s chest when he wasn’t expecting it, or Lillard throwing a pass to Antetokounmpo out of bounds, or Antetokounmpo losing the handle on a speed drive – but the Heat were never stagnant, allowing themselves to be in position to capitalize on the extra chances.

In the first half, Miami shot 56% overall and 57.1% from behind the three-point line.

Though the Heat shooting predictably regressed in the second half, it didn’t cool off enough for the Bucks to truly get back in the game. Though Milwaukee got to within nine points at 79-70 at the 7-minute, 10-second mark of the third quarter, Jović, Love and Robinson promptly knocked down timely triples to extend the Miami advantage to 92-72 four minutes later.

Miami outscored the Bucks 19-6 over the final 6:30 of the decisive third quarter to take a 98-76 lead into the fourth quarter. They were 16 for 30 (53%) from behind the three-point line.

“It was a lot of off the ball movement,” Lillard said of the Heat’s offensive success.

“They had a lot of actions where they had as smaller guy in the dunker and they were rolling them down the middle ‘cause they were kind of positioning our smaller guy to be the guy to lift up against him and you know, we just keeping coming in because we knew that we were outmatched with the size and they were just spraying the ball around.

“I think it was just the movement. Duncan Robinson, Herro, they were just kind of running around a lot of the ball. See a couple go in, and our offense didn’t really help our defense. We was in a lot of scramble situations where we were behind the play and they shot the ball well.

“Sometimes it’s like that, but I thought it was some things we could’ve done better to maybe disrupt they offense a little bit. But they got going.”

Miami also stayed composed offensively even as Milwaukee began to chip away at the lead, continuing to spread the ball around and work for the best shot. Adebayo and Herro, in particular, didn’t get caught up in trying to do too much individually. Adebayo had a triple-double with 11 assists to go with 12 rebounds and Herro and Robinson had five assists each.

Turning point

Lillard and Giannis got the Bucks back into the game early in the third quarter, with Lillard hitting a pair of three-pointers and converting three free throws and Antetokounmpo scoring four points and assisting on two other baskets.

Suddenly, a 17-point deficit was being whittled down and after a Lillard came off an Antetokounmpo screen to convert a floater that made it 79-70 with 7:10 to go in the quarter the Miami was lead was down to nine.

But then Antetokounmpo turned the ball over, leading to a Jović three-pointer and consecutive two-man actions between the Bucks stars came up empty.

Lillard pulled up behind an Antetokounmpo screen but his three-point attempt hit the font of the rim and an Antetokounmpo layup attempt while rolling of his screen also missed. The Heat meanwhile, made a basket and the lead was back to double-digits, and the Bucks never got back in the game.

Too many turnovers for Bucks

The Bucks just couldn’t hold onto the ball on Tuesday, giving it away 15 times. But more than that, the Heat took advantage by scoring 29 points when the starters were in the game – which perhaps coincidentally was the margin in the game at 113-84 when fans started filing out of the arena with 7:40 to go in the game.

“Just the speed, pace, they were quicker on everything, on both ends,” Rivers said.

“You have these nights. You hate ‘em, but it is what is. For as bad as it looked defensively I thought our offense was way worse tonight. I thought it started early. We were shooting 51% at halftime and I thought we were playing just awful offense. And I thought that started our defense.