Hyde: It’s Butler’s team and Sunday again was his time
It’s Butler’s team and Sunday again was his time
Usually, an NBA game is a straightforward story, told through a statistics sheet and filtered through the final minutes. But Jimmy Butler delivered a wonderfully complicated game Sunday that resonated like the complex Miami Heat forward himself.
Butler played basketball for aficionados, for beyond-thebox-score purists in a 130-124 win at Boston — a game the Heat needed to win all the other
things they want coming up.
The question faded long ago how Butler didn’t fit with Chicago, with Minnesota, with Philadelphia. It’s simply how he folds so neatly into everything Heat.
You had to see the full scope of Sunday afternoon to understand. The Heat came out like a storm surge with six players in double figures in a first half where they led by an eye-rubbing score of 79-53.
Butler’s numbers were just as telling. He took one shot in that deluge. He had four points. He still might have been the best
player on the court. He quieted Boston’s best player, Jayson Tatum, on defense.
He also ran the offense for long chunks, moving the ball to where his seven assists told as much about his play as that one measly shot. The Heat had 19 assists against four turnovers in the half. There’s the Heat team that’s gone missing for large chunks of the year.
“It’s the epitome of a guy that’s just competing in basketball,’’ Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said of Butler’s half. “It’s not about stats, not about shots, not about scoring. It’s what’s necessary.
“In this game, he lines up against the association’s most explosive scorers. And, offensively, just to lead the game, a lot of that is his allowing other guys to get in a great rhythm.”
Then came Act II. That 26-point halftime lead was whittled to 13 midway through the fourth quarter. Butler again knew what was needed. He hit a 14-point jumper. The lead dwindled to six points with under five points to play. Butler took and made a rare 3-pointer.
The Heat came out of a timeout and Butler missed a shot. It wasn’t all perfect — and it wasn’t all him as Bam Adebayo and Duncan Robinson hit shots down the stretch. But to close it out, Butler powered to the basket over Boston’s Tristan Thompson to make it 127-118 with just under a minute left.
“You could see how much he settles our team offensively when they were making a run in the fourth quarter,’’ Spoelstra said. “You have to expect games to be a full 48 minutes. They made a great push.
“But we were able to get the ball to Jimmy, get to our spots and play off our decision-making. That gives the team an incredible amount of confidence in close games.”
For all the progressive steps of Adebayo, for all the shooting or Robinson or toughness of Goran Dragic, this team understands to whom to turn when the water goes rough.
“He’s a calming influence,’’ Robinson said.
You can nod along with the Heat on Sunday, seeing them play like the first half, even if you aren’t ready to trust it completely. Butler sure isn’t. He said when they move the ball and make shots like in the first half the defense follows in form.
But when they don’t make shots? “Then we don’t play defense and we foul,’’ he said. “We’ve got to do better.”
Butler seemed less impressed about the Heat gaining the lead in the first half as losing its margin in the second.
“I think we’re a really good team,’’ he said. “But sometimes we think we’re too good a team and play the game lackadaisically,”
Even that abrasive mindset fits, doesn’t it? Somewhere under the layers of franchise folklore — of defining phrases like, “Heat DNA,” of brusque lines like, “we’re not for everyone,” of mantras like being the “toughest, meanest, nastiest team in the NBA” — somewhere under that crusty core you found Butler standing again Sunday.
He followed the four points in the first half when all his teammates were making shots with 22 points in the second half. For the game, the stat sheet looks complete: 26 points, 11 assists, eight rebounds.
But it’s what is behind the numbers that mattered. He read the day. He delivered what the game needed.
“I could care less if I shoot the ball zero times in a game, I’m just here to win,” he said.
That’s a throwaway line for most. But when the Heat put up 79 points in a half and he takes one shot? Still, that was only half Sunday’s story. When someone needed to stand up and hold the line, there he was, too. His game, like his person, can be wonderfully complicated.