In big-time sports, all sorts of sins can be overlooked in the name of talent. Assault and battery? Domestic abuse? Weapons charges? If you can run fast enough or jump high enough, those are issues a forgiving franchise can massage into minor infractions.
What about the crime of being a serial pain in the ass? It depends.
Jimmy Butler is doing that thing he does, making life difficult for people, whether by trying to make everyone around him better on the basketball court or by making a scene and being noticed. How you look at it is a matter of perspective. If you’re a Jimmy guy, you see a man ever in search of excellence, a mini Michael Jordan who demands much from his team. If you’re not a Jimmy guy, or even if you’re somewhere in the middle, you see a man strong-arming the spotlight so it shines solely on him.
But … talent. The 25-year-old version of Jimmy Butler might be worth all the nonsense he serves up on an annual basis. The 35-year-old version isn’t.
The Heat have suspended Butler three times in the past month, most recently for walking out of practice upon learning that the team planned to replace him in the starting lineup. At some point, and that point probably arrived 10 years ago, it became apparent that, for all his excellence and for all that he finds lacking in teammates and coaches, he’s a big part of the problem. He was a problem you could live with much of the time — he could give you 25 points whenever you needed it, and he could give you lockdown defense always.
But too often he’s the pothole full of water you don’t see until you step in it. It happened with the Bulls, when he clashed with Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah, dissed coach Fred Hoiberg and eventually was traded to the Timberwolves. He blew up in Minnesota, clashed with coach Brett Brown in Philadelphia after being traded there and has had a series of eruptions in Miami. The problem this time, besides Butler’s career winding down, is that Heat president Pat Riley is a bigger presence in Miami than Butler is. Butler, serving an indefinite suspension, will be traded, which is what he wants. But does anyone ever really know what he wants? Ah, we might have stumbled upon the essence of Jimmy.
He has always understood entertainment value, and if you like drama, which is as much a part of the NBA as dribbling is, then you like him. If you don’t like soap operas, the guy can wear you out. I’m exhausted by him, and I happened to love Butler the player. But he realized early on that he could be a star as much for his histrionics as for his considerable basketball skills. He has parlayed that into a lot of money and a lot of attention. That has turned into a lot of success and misery for the teams he played for and a lot of fodder for the people who see the league as a reality show. He seems comfortable being in the middle of a mess.
He clearly has worn out the Heat, who are 13-12 with him in the lineup this season and 10-10 without him. They’re not a dominant force anymore, and he’s no longer “Playoff Jimmy.’’ If he were beloved, if he were woven into the fabric of a franchise, then maybe his idiosyncrasies could be overlooked. But he’s not.
He was closest to that in Chicago. The Bulls used the 30th overall pick of the 2011 draft to take him. Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau helped turn him into the brute force he became on the court, but when the Bulls fired Thibodeau in 2015, there wasn’t anyone to save Butler from himself.
For all the pressure he’s put on his teammates, he hasn’t won an NBA championship. Maybe that’s what his disputes with the Heat are really about. Perhaps he sees a franchise going nowhere and now, in his 14th season, he sees his chances of a ring vanishing. Getting traded to a contender would give him the opportunity to attain what’s eluded him his entire career.
One problem: You can stick a ring on Butler’s finger as an add-on to an already talented team, but his legacy is not going to be that of an NBA champion. He’ll finally be seen as a winner, yes, but as a sore winner, one who has sown excellence and discontent wherever he’s gone. Too bad, because he was a heck of a player. The rest of it, all the nonsense, obscured that fact too often.