Jimmy Butler’s Messy Splits

Sometimes, at the start of a relationship, you can see its end. When the Miami Heat acquired Jimmy Butler, in 2019, what did they expect would happen? “I like controversy,” Butler said to reporters, in 2017, when he was a member of the Chicago Bulls. Right around that time, he was fined for a locker-room argument in which he questioned the younger players’ desire to win. He felt underappreciated, and he reportedly called the team’s head coach, Fred Hoiberg, “soft.” Butler was traded to the Minnesota Timberwolves after the Bulls were knocked out of the playoffs. “I feed off of confrontation,” he told the basketball writer Michael Pina that summer. “It makes me go.”

Butler forced his way out of Minnesota at the start of his second season there. After asking for a trade, he skipped the first two weeks of training camp. He bridled at being made to practice despite his trade request. “I have a for-real problem with authority,” he later explained on J. J. Redick’s podcast. “When somebody’s telling me what to do as a grown man, I have a problem with it.” When he finally showed up, he started yelling at the general manager, Scott Layden. “You fucking need me, Scott,” he said. “You can’t win without me.” Butler joined a reserve squad for a scrimmage, and they crushed the starters. He shut down the team’s best players largely by himself. When the game was over, his Timberwolves teammate Jeff Teague recalled, Butler took off his warmups to reveal his shirt and shorts, with big holes where he had cut out the word “Minnesota.” He bolted before practice was even over. When the other Timberwolves headed back to the locker room, they turned on ESPN and saw Butler, already at home, describing his discontent to the journalist Rachel Nichols. The interview had already been set up.

A month after that, the Timberwolves traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers. With Butler, the 76ers made the Eastern Conference semifinals, where they narrowly lost to the Toronto Raptors. Then, in the offseason, the 76ers decided to sign Tobias Harris, instead of paying Butler what he thought he was worth. Butler left Philly for Miami, and later described his fallout with the team on Redick’s podcast. He said that he’d heard there were questions about whether the 76ers’ coach, Brett Brown, could “control him.” “I was, like, ‘You don’t gotta worry about it,’ ” Butler said. “Shit, can’t nobody fucking control me.” When he was playing for Miami in the 2022 playoffs, the Heat beat the 76ers and he shouted, “Tobias Harris over me?”

Miami was supposed to be different, in the same way that Butler was clearly different. Other stars had forced their way into trades before: Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard, Ben Simmons, James Harden, Carmelo Anthony, and Paul George, among others. Some of those deals worked out; some did not. But no one had ever seemed to fit his new team quite like Butler seemed to fit the Heat. The team was hypercompetitive; Butler was, too. The Heat had the hardest preseason conditioning test in the league; Butler’s intense work ethic was legendary. Butler was a “serial killer’s dream,” his personal skills trainer told Pina, back in 2017. “He does the same shit every fucking day.” Pat Riley, the Heat’s calculating, impenetrable president? Also a serial killer’s dream. Both fetishized toughness and proving others wrong. Butler played in junior college before transferring to Marquette University, and was the thirtieth pick in the N.B.A. draft. In Miami, he was the best player on a team that relied on contributions from former G Leaguers and undrafted players. The Heat made the N.B.A. Finals as the fifth seed in the East, in 2020, and again, as the eighth seed, in 2023. The higher the stakes, the harder the team hustled. The higher the stakes, the better Butler got.

Before “Heat Culture” was a brand—the words now painted on the floor, sold on jerseys—it seemed to be a real thing. Intangible, but real. You could find evidence of it in the stats of playoff games, like charges taken and loose balls recovered, and in the intensity of the team’s zone defense. You could hear it in the zeal with which players spoke about it, and their pride that not everyone could stand it. Heat culture predated Butler; its paragon was Riley. He wore suits and slicked back his hair, and, as Udonis Haslem, the player who, more than anyone, represented the team’s ethos, said, Riley wanted his teams to be “a little nasty.” And there was something a little nasty about the way Riley pushed players, and sometimes pushed them out, even the stars. Shaquille O’Neal, Alonzo Mourning, Dwyane Wade, LeBron James all left. But all of them came to praise Riley, and some of them have returned to his fold.

When Butler arrived, he seemed to embody the team’s energy. But in fact he was a culture all of his own. Stories have been emerging about how there were cracks forming in the relationships between Riley and Butler, between Butler and other members of the team. He would fly private instead of joining everyone on the charter. He’d stay at his own place, not the team hotel. He got special treatment, which was nothing new; stars often do. But, as far as the tenets of Heat culture go, hard work wins championships, sacrifice wins championships, toughness wins championships. Teamwork, not freelancing stars, wins championships. Butler was, at times, a great teammate, but also in many ways an island unto himself.

Heat culture hasn’t actually won any championships in recent years. But good players have, and lately Miami has needed more of them. Butler has often been injured, and is thirty-five years old now. The team has been focussed on cultivating a few of its best young players, including Tyler Herro and Bam Adebayo. The front office’s failure to sign another big star reportedly frustrated Butler. Then the Heat did not offer him the two-year, hundred-and-thirteen-million-dollar max extension he was eligible for this past summer. Riley raised questions about Butler’s durability and ego, after Butler declared, in May, that the Heat could have gone further in the post-season had he been fully healthy. “For him to say that, I thought, Is that Jimmy trolling or is that Jimmy serious?” Riley said. “If you’re not on the court playing against Boston, or on the court playing against the New York Knicks, you should keep your mouth shut in your criticism of those teams.”

The Heat probably should have traded him right then. Riley might have been right about not offering Butler so much money, but it has always been clear that, to Butler, money is a signal of value, respect. Maybe Riley was also right about Butler’s chirping, but it’s no surprise to learn that Butler reportedly took offense to that, too. During the start of the season, Butler was in and out of the lineup with injuries, and sometimes seemed to be out of it even when he was in. He let it leak that he wanted to be traded. He talked about wanting to recover his “joy” on the court. The Heat suspended him for seven games, citing issues with his conduct toward the team. He skipped a flight, and was suspended for another two. Then he came to practice, and was told he’d be replaced in the starting lineup with Haywood Highsmith, a player few outside of Miami, and quite possibly few within it, had heard of. The N.B.A. reporter Brian Windhorst later described it as a setup, and Butler complied, walking out. The Heat suspended him indefinitely.

It’s likely that he’ll be traded by Thursday’s deadline. He is still a fantastic defender, a disciplined player, a gnarly competitor, and now he has something to prove. It’s been rumored that the Heat, who clearly have no other choice, have been dropping the price and now are shopping him cheap. Some people have wondered why he would sink his stock and worsen his trade value. They seem to suggest that he should view himself as fans and analysts sometimes view him, as an asset. They wonder why he isn’t more considerate of his teammates, whom he’s putting in an awful position, and why he’d damage his legacy. His teammates, for their part, appear ready to move on from him.

“You gotta go further into my life to understand why I am the way that I am,” Butler told Sports Illustrated, a few years ago. “And I ain’t changing.” He grew up in Tomball, Texas, a tiny town outside of Houston. His father left him and his mother, and then his mother kicked him out when he was thirteen. She told him, he recalled, “I don’t like the look of you.” He had to fend for himself, and went from couch to couch, until a friend’s family took him in. “I’m gonna go or I’m gonna be or I’m gonna stay wherever I’m wanted, man. Because that’s all anybody ever wants,” he said, in 2017. “To be appreciated.”

There was a sense, in Miami, that he’d found his people: the intense coach, who could in one moment nearly come to blows with him and in another embrace him; the teammates who could withstand his brutal workouts, who had nearly as much to prove as he did; and Riley, a man who might just possibly understand and value him. Riley has heaped praise on Butler in the past. But lately there has been the reminder of limits, an almost paternal strictness. You should keep your mouth shut. Riley rarely speaks to the press these days, but he recently went on the podcast of Dan Le Batard, and they spoke as friends do. At several points in the course of nearly two hours, Riley sounded emotional, choked up. They discussed Riley’s father, a “great man,” Riley said, who had never achieved his own dreams as a ballplayer, and who’d been very hard on his children. “Whatever I did wasn’t good enough.” Later he said, of him and his siblings, “Without a doubt, we were survivors. If my father gave us one thing, all of us, it’s, You’re on your own. And, when we all got the opportunity to leave, we left.”

Riley got a scholarship to the University of Kentucky, where he played on an all-white team that lost the national championship to Texas Western College, in a game that helped drive the integration of sports. From there, he went pro, before becoming a commentator and then a coach. His father died when he was twenty-five. There was the suggestion, throughout the interview, that Riley turned basketball into a family, though his model at times has seemed more like that of a Don than the life he shares with his wife and children. (His nickname is the Godfather.) It’s not clear precisely when the interview was recorded, but, when he was asked by Le Batard about the way he related to players these days, his answer seemed to allude to Butler in particular:

The younger generation is just different than it was when I grew up. . . . I think most of us, my age, grew up at a time when our parents were harder, if we had them, if we had what they call the “nuclear family.” It was hard, but it was different. There was—even if it was a stone cold house, there was love there. We had a place to go home every night and there were two parents that cared about you, that provided for you. Maybe they didn’t love you like you wanted them to love you, but it was different. I’m not saying today’s player is not that, but it was harder and we understood that.

Players needed to understand, he added, that, though they might live their lives the way they wanted, they owed something to the team. “Render unto Caesar what is his,” he said.

But who owes whom what, exactly? At times what he describes does sound like a trap—not only for his players but for himself. At one point, he talked about how he’d had conflicts with many of the great players he had coached, in the way that families can have rifts, but that “everybody keeps coming back to the center of the circle.” He went on: “I think it’s up to a son to come back to a dysfunctional relationship, maybe between a father and a son, and to reconcile. It isn’t up to the dad. They’re too proud.” And suddenly he was speaking about his own father. The past has a way of haunting the present, after all. ♦