Trading Jimmy Butler Won’t Save the Miami Heat. Neither Will Keeping Him.

NBANBAIn Miami, the word “rebuild” is synonymous with failure. But with a disgruntled star, depleted resources, and little hope of contending, Pat Riley might be facing his greatest challenge yet.

By Michael PinaDec. 31, 2024, 1:42 pm UTC • 8 min

If the Miami Heat haven’t already reached the end of their road with Jimmy Butler, a turnoff is coming.

On Christmas Day, in a climactic reveal that had been bubbling in the rumor mill for weeks, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that Butler would prefer to be traded before the February 6 deadline and is targeting the Phoenix Suns, Houston Rockets, Golden State Warriors, or Dallas Mavericks, with several others reportedly calling the Heat to gauge their interest. Miami’s swift response came the next day by way of a statement from Pat Riley.

“We usually don’t comment on rumors, but all this speculation has become a distraction to the team and is not fair to the players and coaches. Therefore, we will make it clear—We are not trading Jimmy Butler.” In a league saturated by obfuscation, particularly when dealing with the fractured relationship between a star and his employer, there are several different ways to interpret Riley’s words, which did not necessarily refute ESPN’s report or change the truth about Miami’s shortcomings.

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Riley’s retort might be a negotiating tactic. Offers for Butler are, in all likelihood, embarrassingly light right now. He’s a temperamental, injury-prone 35-year-old who can become a free agent this summer. Nobody is giving up the farm for that. But with over a month between now and the trade deadline—an eternity on the NBA’s clock—there’s plenty of time for the Warriors, Suns, or any other potential buyer to become even more desperate than they already are. It’s improbable but not impossible.

The statement is almost definitely also a finger wag at Butler, who hasn’t publicly denounced any of the gossip about his future despite multiple opportunities to do so. Jimmy wants another massive payday but has no leverage to receive it from a franchise that has made clear it doesn’t intend to pony up, preferring instead to preserve its flexibility and make use of the next exit ramp. According to the Miami Herald:

Butler has been disappointed with the Heat primarily because Miami declined to give him a two-year, $113 million contract extension this past summer, a deal that would have run through the 2026-27 season. Butler was open to signing such a deal early in the negotiating window, but his mindset changed when the extension wasn’t immediately offered by the Heat. The Heat could still offer Butler that extension until June 30, but Miami has given no indication that it will. After the Heat did not quickly agree to an extension this past offseason, Butler decided to play out this season and exercise his option to become a free agent this upcoming summer. That remains his intention, sources said.

The situation is unfortunate. This Heat team, sitting at 16-14 and seventh in the East, is not terrible. It’s just about top 10 on both sides of the ball, despite Bam Adebayo’s down year, Terry Rozier’s failure to provide any punch, lackluster starts from Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Nikola Jovic, and the sixth-worst crunch-time offense in the league. After a dozen games, Erik Spoelstra changed Miami’s starting lineup for good by replacing Rozier and Jovic with Haywood Highsmith and Duncan Robinson. Since then, Miami is 11-7, with the 10th-best net rating in the league. For the season, Miami is third in free throw differential, and ESPN’s BPI projection system currently believes there’s an 85.9 percent chance that the Heat will make the playoffs.

And when he has played, Butler has looked like his irreplaceable self. Miami’s offensive rating is 117.3 with him on the court and 106.9 when he sits, one of the largest differentials among rotation players in the league. He’s averaging the fewest shot attempts per 100 possessions since he first made an All-Star team back in 2015 but currently holds the third-highest free throw rate and second-highest true shooting percentage of his career. He’s smart, poised, and aggressive when the game’s circumstances demand him to be. The Heat have dominated the minutes when Butler has shared the court with Tyler Herro and Adebayo.

Miami’s reservations about giving Butler an extension are understandable, though, given Butler’s sporadic availability, looming physical decline, and grating persona. During an infamous press conference last May, Riley complimented Butler several times and made clear how important he was to the team. He also expressed some frustration with his franchise player’s inability to act like a franchise player (on and off the court). On the topic of a contract extension: “That’s a big decision on our part to commit those kinds of resources unless you have somebody who’s going to be there and available every single night. That’s the truth.”

Seven months later, Butler has missed 10 of Miami’s 30 games. Despite some respectable output from the team, there’ve been unforced errors, visible frustration on both ends, miscommunication, poorly timed scoring droughts, and disjointed possessions when it looks as if nobody knows what’s going on, where they’re supposed to be, or what they’re supposed to do:

Some weird, miserable stuff has happened to the Heat, too—from Spoelstra’s Chris Webber moment in Detroit to last week’s historic meltdown against the Orlando Magic to Dru Smith bouncing back from last year’s torn ACL only to tear his Achilles in a recent win against the Nets. None are stranger or more meaningful than when Butler seemed to tweak his ankle eight minutes into a loss against the Thunder on December 20 and was then away from the team due to sickness for the next 10 days. During that stretch, he missed five games and Riley released his statement to quell any distractions that are “not fair to the players and coaches.” Related: Lineups that feature Herro and Adebayo without Butler have been terrible. Bam is one of the premier defensive players of his generation, and Herro is a 24-year-old in the midst of what’s by far his most impressive season. But no team can call itself a contender with that pair as its top two players.

Zooming out, Riley’s message forebodes something we haven’t seen in quite some time: a crack in the Heat’s armor. Whether Butler is traded or not, this team is currently caught up in an unfamiliar, steady drift toward mediocrity and irrelevance—the dissolution of a decades-long era that was defined by the Heat’s singular ability to withstand, if not annihilate, the most adverse conditions.

If a primary theme of the Golden State Warriors’ dynastic decade was joy, the Heat’s resilience should be remembered for the team’s militaristic ability to strip all exuberance away from its opponent. By a wide margin, they deploy more zone defense than anybody else and are the only team in the league, according to Sportradar, that ranks top three in possessions that include a trap, stunt, or dig from help defenders.

Miami dominates the game’s mundanity, winning with pressure, physicality, and a trademarked culture that’s steeped in discipline, hard work, and toughness. While not able to protect every member in the organization from the more noxious disruptions that other teams are doomed to suffer through every year, that environment does a pretty good job of keeping actual basketball games at the center of their universe. Commendable and effective.

But now, with depleted resources, a thin, talent-stricken roster, and little hope of contending for a championship anytime soon, Butler and Riley are at odds. There’s also one part of Charania’s Christmas Day report that might’ve gotten under Riley’s skin: “Over the last three years, Jimmy Butler has wanted the Heat to go get him some help in that roster. They just have not been able to land players. They’ve gone after Kevin Durant, Damian Lillard, Kyrie Irving. They have not been able to land that next big fish with Jimmy Butler.”

Culture is a baseline for consistency. But talent wins the day, and the Heat have never won a title without a top-five player and multiple complementary All-Stars thriving at a high level. The Heat’s decision not to trade for Lillard (or Jrue Holiday!) two summers ago is a dark cloud that still hangs over their present while threatening to short-circuit the future. Throw in last January’s curious decision to exchange a first-round pick and Kyle Lowry for Rozier—which, at the time, seemed more like a desperate last gasp than the type of move a confident front office makes to fortify its roster—and what you have is a team that’s spinning its wheels. The natural pivot at this point would be a deliberate step backward. But, in Miami, the word “rebuild” is synonymous with failure. It goes against the dignified self-image and sky-high aspirations that help separate the Heat from almost every other organization. (They watched LeBron James walk out the door in 2014 and responded by signing Luol Deng, trading for Goran Dragic, and then winning 48 games two years later!) It’s also a logistical nightmare.

Riley would probably love to unload Butler for a liberating haul of draft picks and young (i.e., cheap) talent, but that option doesn’t exist given his star’s sinking value. Instead, the Heat are more likely to tread water and hope that another star falls in their lap.

Miami can open up max cap space in 2026, when Adebayo’s new extension kicks in and Butler is off the books. Free agency is not the easiest way to build a team in the modern NBA, but the Heat have geographic and tax-related advantages that make them inherently attractive to the league’s glitteriest names. Luka Doncic, Durant, Trae Young, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and De’Aaron Fox (Adebayo’s college teammate) can all be unrestricted free agents that summer.

Nicknamed the Godfather, Riley is hallowed for his shrewdness and opportunism. He’s also 79 years old, an icon who won one title as a player, six as a coach, and two more as an executive. At some point, people who’ve experienced this much success can’t have a realist’s point of view. Riley evolves and adjusts, but he’ll never abandon the principles that helped carry him to where he’s at.

“Until you change the way you go about doing the things that are necessary to win, whatever they are, those things you’re doing to try to win, if they aren’t working, let’s change,” Riley said last May. “And so, that doesn’t mean that change is a sinister word here. … We have to change some things, but we surely are not going to rip anything apart here.”

Meanwhile, as Riley’s protégé and someone who’s carried forward his cultural outlook better than anyone else, Spoelstra has been consistently great at disconnecting from whatever narrative the general public wants to spin about his team and then emerging with the situation under control.

The impossible is nothing more than a hurdle for these men. Their defiance (with a helpful pinch of delusion) infuses the Heat with enough ambition and competitive edge to continually raise their own standards. To strive and overcome at whatever cost, obstacles be damned. If the past few years have reinforced anything, it’s that betting against Riley and Spoelstra is unwise. But their odds have never looked as uncertain as they do right now. And, in a sense, they’re also victims of their own steadfast self-belief. Pride comes before the fall, etc.

Butler saved this team half a decade ago—when it was coming off a 39-win season with 37-year-old Dwyane Wade as the sixth man—but now it appears this era has run its course. Riley and Spoelstra have no obvious contingency plan in sight—but if they can carve a new path to the NBA’s mountaintop after Butler’s gone, it just may be their most impressive achievement yet.

Statistics as of December 30.