It’s all about the win for Miami’s Butler
He’ll need to be as good as he was in Game 3 for Heat to even series
You can’t put Jimmy Butler in a corner or a box or any of the other clichés attached to NBA players these days.
He is unique, an iconoclast: part throwback, part wave of the future. He gets 40 points in a game in today’s NBA without even attempting a three-point shot. He scores when everyone knows he has to score. He defends LeBron James, plays 45 minutes, talks a bit of trash and, well, he’s Jimmy being Jimmy.
He is, as his coach Erik Spoelstra said Sunday night: “Jimmy Effing Butler.”
The Miami Heat, and the NBA Finals, are better off for it and it’s futile to try to perfectly explain him.
“I think if you just constantly try to evaluate him and put him in a box of conventional thinking of basketball, you’re just only going to get confused,” Spoelstra said Monday after Butler breathed life into the NBA Finals with a 40-point triple-double in Miami’s Game 3 win over the Los Angeles Lakers on Sunday night. “He is an elite competitor. He is a great basketball player. It’s attached to how he impacts winning, not to this modern-day definition of three-point percentage or three-and-D or all these little terms you hear.
“He’s a throwback. It’s about how he impacts winning, how he impacts your team, your locker room, your culture, your franchise. He does that in a remarkable way.”
His own way.
The thing perhaps most impressive about Butler is an unequivocal attitude that nothing matters as long as his team wins. The points don’t matter, the assists don’t matter and the accolades absolutely don’t matter.
What matters is who won the game, and since he’s playing for an organization led by Pat Riley — who once said “there’s winning, and then there’s misery” — it’s a rather perfect fit.
“I’ll do whatever you ask me to do, if you can guarantee me a win,” Butler said Monday. “I realize that nothing is guaranteed, but I’ll do whatever you ask me to do to put my team in the best position to win. That’s it.”
What Butler may have to do is seize Tuesday night’s Game 4 like he took Game 3 by the throat and made it his. The Heat are unlikely to have injured guard Goran Dragic and while ailing big man Bam Adebayo has a better chance of playing, that chance is still slim. That means it’s going to have to be the Butler Show again, whether he likes it or not.
“We don’t care what he thinks about that right now,” Spoelstra said. “We’re way past that now. There’s no turning back. He has to make some things happen for us. He did that in a brilliant way (Sunday) night, and he’ll likely have to do something very similar to that again.
“He’s shouldering major responsibilities on both sides of the floor. This is what he’s always wanted as a competitor. This is what we want from him. He’s going to continue to get tested and challenged by this competition, and I just love seeing what’s coming out of that, that competition.”
The feeling is that Butler would love to come out of a game and be asked about the stellar performances of teammates Tyler Herro or Duncan Robinson or Kelly Olynyk or Adebayo or Dragic, and be far more content than he his talking about his own exploits. But that’s not going to happen. For the Heat to even the series at two games apiece, he’s got to be as good as he was Sunday and the focal point of it all.
“I think as long as we win, everybody is happy with that, but we’ve got to win,” he said. “Whatever it takes to get to that point, yeah. I can’t say that that’s what it’s going to come to, but if coach would say ‘Hey, I need you to do this,’ our guys would say ‘We need you to do this,’ I’ve got to go out there and do it. I’ve got to make sure that we win.”
None of this should be taken as a lack of confidence. He’s known for a long time how good he can be. He just also knows how good his team can be if he doesn’t dominate.
The confidence, though? It’s been a building since he was a kid with the Chicago Bulls, more than a decade ago.
“I think it helped to have guys like Luol (Deng) and Ronnie Brewer and (current Raptors assistant) coach Adrian Griffin,” Butler said. “They were always telling me, ‘You’re gonna make your mark in this league. You deserve to be here. You belong here.’
“That’s when I really started to be like, you know what, if these guys are telling me that — they’ve been here way longer than I have, they know what it takes — that’s when I started to think maybe (I) can become a decent player in this league.”