On Dec. 26, Pat Riley went public with the same message that the Miami Heat had been sending privately: “We are not trading Jimmy Butler.”
One week later, Butler said he wanted to “get my joy back from playing basketball,” and, when asked if that could happen in Miami, he replied, “Probably not.” ESPN then reported that Butler had formally requested a trade.
Why did Butler turn up the heat (lol) on Thursday? One “issue that led to his decision,” per ESPN, was “an implication from team officials Thursday that he hadn’t played his hardest” in Miami’s 119-108 win against the New Orleans Pelicans on Wednesday. According to Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Butler’s camp came to believe that, after the game against the Pels, the team was considering suspending him “in the wake of an uneven effort.” Butler’s first field goal attempt after a five-game absence was a one-legged 3 in the corner, and he didn’t see the floor in the fourth quarter.
The Heat maintain that they were not, in fact, considering a suspension, according to the Sun Sentinel, but, after Thursday’s 128-115 loss against the Indiana Pacers, Butler made it clear that he did not want his competitiveness to be questioned.
“Whether I score nine points or 29 points, I will compete, that’s one thing that I will say,” Butler told reporters. “So you won’t say that I’m out there not playing hard. It may look like that because my usage is down and I don’t shoot the ball a lot, but we won’t sit here and say that I don’t play hard.”
The notion that he might be suspended was the “tipping point,” according to the Sun Sentinel. But in the context of the game Butler and the Heat are playing, the six-time All-Star’s latest move is best understood as a response to Riley’s.
Riley’s statement functioned as a message to Butler and his potential suitors: Miami is fine with the status quo. The Brooklyn Nets are the only team projected to have the cap space to sign a star player in the summer, when Butler can become a free agent, so the Heat aren’t afraid of losing him for nothing. Besides, as a result of the new CBA, even letting him walk wouldn’t really mean losing him for nothing — it would give the front office much more financial flexibility moving forward. For the Heat to trade him before the Feb. 6 deadline instead of waiting to see what their sign-and-trade options are in July, they’d need a more attractive offer than anything that has been presented to them.
Butler, however, is not fine with the status quo. And five weeks before the deadline, he did his version of the “this situation is crazy” press conference that effectively ended James Harden’s tenure in Houston. The question now is whether or not this changes anything.
The put-pressure-on-Miami strategy presupposes that Butler is still on the roster because the front office has not shown sufficient urgency when it comes to trading him. But what looks like the Heat’s unwillingness to make a deal could really be other teams’ disinterest in parting with high-value players and/or picks to get him. Butler is 35 years old, which means he’ll only be attractive to win-now teams, and he’s making $48.8 million this season, which makes trades mechanically difficult. In theory, teams like the Golden State Warriors and Denver Nuggets might be able to get something done, but nothing that happened on Thursday puts pressure on them.
This whole thing is more contentious now, but, broadly speaking, Butler and Miami are in the same place they’ve been since the press conference last May in which Riley scolded Butler and implied that a contract extension wasn’t forthcoming. Butler reportedly plans to turn down his $52.4 million player option for next season, and the Heat are reportedly in no rush to trade him before that happens. If Miami is as confident in its plan as it seems, then Butler becoming a bigger distraction won’t give him much leverage.
