Jimmy Butler says Miami return is just 'another game' — but his previous stops suggest it's not
Butler has had plenty of practice entering a once-friendly gym as Public Enemy No. 1. How will he handle the Heat?
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When the Golden State Warriors take on the Miami Heat on Tuesday, it will mark Jimmy Butler’s first game back at Kaseya Center since the blockbuster that sent him from Biscayne Bay to the Bay Area. That seems like a pretty big deal, given both the nature of how Butler’s five-and-a-half-year tenure in Miami ended — with trade requests and suspensions, with fines and fury — and the stark disparity in the fortunes of the franchises involved since the deal.
The rejuvenated Warriors have won 16 of 20 games since the Butler trade, surging into the West’s top six. Miami, on the other hand, has gone just 5-17 since sending Butler away, falling into 10th place in the East, just one loss away from guaranteeing the Heat’s first losing season since 2018-19 — which, coincidentally, was the season before Butler arrived in South Florida.
Despite all of that, though, Butler insists that, for him, Tuesday will feel unremarkable — just one of 82, no more, no less. From ESPN’s Ohm Youngmisuk:
"Yeah, I was traded from there, yada, yada, yada," Butler said after finishing with 25 points, 8 assists and 4 rebounds in [Saturday’s] loss to Atlanta. "Yeah, it didn't end the way that people wanted to, yada yada yada.
"But that's so far behind me now. I don't even think about it. I don't pay attention to nothing except for the trajectory of this squad … Another game for me. Another game that we're expected to win, for sure."
He doubled down on that stance at the Warriors’ practice in Florida on Monday, downplaying the achievements of his five-plus seasons in Miami — three conference finals appearances, two NBA Finals trips, more playoff wins in that span than anyone but the rival Celtics — as just “all right.”
"We didn't win nothing like we were supposed to,” he told reporters. “So, I don't know. We made some cool runs. We had some fun. I think that's all we did."
To some degree, you could understand Butler feeling that way. After all, Miami isn’t the first NBA home he’s left — or the second or third, for that matter — and the 35-year-old’s exit also coincided with him landing the multi-year, maximum-salaried contract extension that he’d sought and that Heat president Pat Riley had blanched at offering.
With the smoke now settled six weeks later, Butler looks like the winner of his trade-deadline duel. For all the noise and drama surrounding his departure, he now has the money and the improved chance at championship contention, with a new employer eager to make space for his outsized personality and particular eccentricities if he can help get Stephen Curry and Draymond Green closer to a fifth NBA championship.
Whether Butler actually feels that way, however, isn’t exactly crystal-clear. As bright as his present and near-future might look, he still seems a bit steamed by the way things ended in Miami. From a sitdown with Anthony Slater of The Athletic:
“There was some foundation to [the Heat organization] in the sense of the work and all that stuff, which is great,” Butler said last week. “I’m not saying it in a bad way, but I think it’s a little bit, like, overused talking about the ‘Heat Culture.’ It is a great organization. But I think a large part of that culture is you get guys that buy into a [winning mindset]. You get some guys that buy in, you get some really good players and you get the opportunity to talk about ‘Heat Culture’ a little bit more. I’m not saying it to talk down or anything, but I think whenever you have really good players you can name it whatever you want to name it.” [...]
Butler has revealed before that part of the reason he left Philadelphia is because he heard leadership there say they’d have him back “if they could control him.” That type of approach is also part of what pushed him out of Miami.
“That’s too hard to do,” Butler said. “You can’t control grown men in this line of work. You can try, but I’m going to do what I want to do. I’m going to show up. I’m going to compete and I’m going to help us win.
“So you can be mad. You can paint a picture that is not entirely true. I don’t even need to get into that. They know what they’re doing. You got to paint somebody to be the bad guy. I’ll take being a bad guy. Makes no difference. I’m here now. I’m competing at a high level and I’m helping the Golden State Warriors win. They want me here. Hell, I’m cool with being a bad guy over there.”
It’s possible that Jimmy is so comfortable being labeled “the bad guy” — and with entering a once-friendly gym as Public Enemy No. 1 — because he’s got plenty of practice.
Butler began his NBA career in Chicago, blossoming from an end-of-the-bench, energy-and-defense swingman into a promising starter under the watchful eye of Tom Thibodeau. But when the Bulls offered him a four-year, $44 million extension of his rookie scale contract heading into the 2014-15 season, the former 30th overall pick said no thanks, believing he’d be able to play himself into commanding a more lucrative contract the next summer in restricted free agency. One Most Improved Player award and All-Star nod later, Butler inked a four-year, $95 million pact — a bet on himself that paid off handsomely, and seemed to cement him as the new face of the Bulls’ franchise.
Two years later, though, while Butler had earned two more All-Star berths and an All-NBA selection, he’d also had his fair share of run-ins with teammates, coaches and executives alike, resulting in him being included in trade discussions and, eventually, shipped off to Minnesota on the night of the 2017 NBA Draft.
“I guess being called the face of an organization isn’t as good as I thought,” he told Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times after the trade. “We all see where being the so-called face of the Chicago Bulls got me. So let me be just a player for the Timberwolves, man. That’s all I want to do. [...] You know what I’ve learned? Face of the team, eventually you’re going to see the back of his head as he’s leaving town. So, no thanks.”
When Butler got his first crack at a Bulls team that sent him off rather than committing to him with a new five-year designated veteran player extension — “Chicago was being cheap, actually. They didn’t want to pay me the supermax,” he told Slater last week — he sure seemed to have a little extra motivation.
“I got that game marked on my calendar,” he told ESPN’s Sam Alipour at the time. “Feb. 9, baby — I'm back. Oh, man, they better hope I go 0-for-30, 'cause every basket I score, I'm looking over at the bench and I got something to say.”
Butler didn’t go 0-for-30. In fact, he scored 38 points with seven rebounds, five assists, four steals and just one turnover in 41 minutes of work. His Wolves would come up just short, though, as Zach LaVine — the key piece of Chicago’s return in the Butler deal — scored eight points in the final 1:11, including the game-winning free throw in a 114-113 Bulls win.
But while Chicago won the battle, Jimmy won the war. Butler would help lead the Wolves to their first playoff appearance in 13 years; the Bulls, on the other hand, would finish 27-55, kickstarting a run of four straight sub-.500 seasons and a prolonged run of mediocrity from which they’ve yet to emerge.
The honeymoon wouldn’t last long in Minnesota, though. Butler’s reportedfrustrations led him to decline an extension offer from the Wolves and request a trade — a request that he infamously punctuated with a practice-session performance for the ages that earned him jeers from the Timberwolves faithful, and that, after a dismal 3-7 start to the campaign, eventually got him a ticket to Philadelphia.
When he first returned to the Twin Cities a few months later, Butler got another earful …
… but, again, got the last laugh, chipping in 12 points, 13 rebounds, five assists and a pair of steals as the Sixers earned a 118-109 victory — one of 51 they’d rack up on the season en route to a second straight playoff appearance, which would see them push the eventual champion Raptors to the absolute brink before being eliminated by Kawhi Leonard’s iconic buzzer-beater.
But — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — the honeymoon wouldn’t last long in Philly, either, with Butler reportedly bristling at his place in a Sixers hierarchy headlined by drafted young stars Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons and chafing under the leadership of head coach Brett Brown.
When the offseason arrived, the Sixers could’ve brought Butler back on a new five-year deal worth up to $190 million. Instead, the franchise opted to double-down on the Embiid-Simmons partnership, re-sign fellow free-agent forward Tobias Harris, and send Butler to Miami in a sign-and-trade deal that would bring back swingman Josh Richardson.
When Butler made his return to the City of Brotherly Love that November — again, stop me if you’ve heard this one before — he was met with vociferous boos …
… but he also — seriously, stop me if you’ve heard this one before — got the last laugh, coming up with severalbigplays late to help Miami score a 108-104 win over his old mates.
The Heat would go on to make the first of two NBA Finals trips during Butler’s stay in South Beach. The Sixers, on the other hand, have still yet to make it out of the second round, thanks in part to Butler and Co. eliminating them in 2022 — a series that Jimmy finished with a flourish (32 points, eight rebounds, four assists, two blocks and a steal in Game 6 in Philly) and an instant all-timer of a quote:
On Tuesday, Butler will return once again to a team he led and left — one that he helped elevate to competing for championships, only to leave acrimony and smoldering rubble in his wake. There will reportedly be a tribute video. There will also, more than likely, be plenty of boos from Heat fans frustrated at how quickly and completely a mostly successful era curdled.
Maybe Butler, icy exterior be damned, will feel some type of way when he hears those jeers. (“I wonder if [those fans] look at the Heat the same way,” Butler told reporters at Warriors practice on Monday. “It ain’t like I was the one who was doing everything.”) And maybe history will repeat itself, and he’ll be the one who winds up having the last laugh.
“I’m always painted as the bad guy. Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve always been the problem,” Butler told reporters Monday. “So we’ll take it. I don’t got nothing to say. I’m not mad at being the bad guy. It’s all the way that everything is portrayed. Some people talk to the media, some people don’t. I’ve never been one to tell my side of the story to almost anybody. Let everybody think that this is what happened and we’ll ride with it.
“And then, in like a year’s time … it’s gonna be somebody else’s fault besides mine.”
