MIAMI—For the 119th time since Jimmy Butler joined Miami, the Heat were playing a game without him.
This was different from the others.
Butler is gone, banished by the Heat for seven games over what they called conduct detrimental to the team — and he’s probably not going to play for Miami again. His suspension started Saturday night when the Heat played the Utah Jazz, and the team says it will agree to his wishes and try to facilitate a trade.
“It’s disappointing when you see the organization and a player going head-to-head like that,” Heat captain Bam Adebayo said Saturday after the team’s shootaround practice. “But the rest of us got to figure out how to win games.”
Butler has not commented publicly on the suspension. The National Basketball Players Association spoke out on Butler’s behalf hours after the Heat announced the suspension on Friday, saying it believes the team’s actions are “excessive and inappropriate.” The suspension could cost Butler about $2.4 million of his $48.8 million salary this season.
“It’s none of our business,” Adebayo said. “It’s for Jimmy and for the management to handle.”
How it gets handled from here, and on what timeframe, is anyone’s guess.
There was a new starting lineup with Butler gone: Miami opened the game with Terry Rozier, Tyler Herro, Haywood Highsmith, Nikola Jovic and Adebayo. Butler’s locker is still the way he left it, shower shoes leaning against the drawer under the seat, a few items hanging on hooks and a few things taped to the wall. It will be cleaned out at some point, but he’s still part of the team.
For now, anyway.
“We’re just going to focus on tonight,“ Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said before the game. ”I want to quiet all the distractions. Enough has been said. We have clarity. We’re just going to focus on this group in the locker room. That’s what I want them to focus on and quiet the noise as much as possible. I’m not a clickbait type of coach, so you’re not going to get anything else really from me. We have a task to do.”
Utah will see Miami twice during Butler’s suspension; the Heat play in Salt Lake City on Thursday. Jazz coach Will Hardy knows being without Butler won’t change Spoelstra’s approach.
“They have a consistency in their program from a competitive standpoint that you know that it doesn’t matter who plays,” Hardy said. “You come here, you play Miami in your building, it’s going to be 48 minutes of highly competitive, physical basketball. Spo has shown that the entire time he’s been in Miami.”
Trading Butler will be a challenge in these NBA times, with the rules of the collective bargaining agreement limiting the ways teams can acquire players. It’s possible, but it’s far from certain. And the Heat simply letting Butler leave as a free agent this summer also remains a possibility — a move that would open up some other avenues for Miami to acquire new players before next season.
“It sucks to see that he won’t be around,” Rozier said.
Butler averaged 21.7 points, 6.2 rebounds and 5.7 assists in 380 games with the Heat, including playoffs. Entering Saturday, since Butler joined the Heat, they won 59.7 percent of their games when he played (227–153); they won 49.2 percent of their games when he didn’t (58–60).
He became eligible last summer for a two-year, $113 million extension. The deal was never offered by the Heat, in part because Butler has missed about one-quarter of the team’s games during his Miami tenure.
It was only natural that such a big sum of money not being offered was going to lead to problems. And the tension boiled over this week. Butler didn’t play in the fourth quarters of Miami games on Wednesday and Thursday; he spent some offensive possessions simply standing in the corner, almost as if he had no role.
“I feel like he came to work, he tried to perform, and it just didn’t go his way,” Adebayo said. “I feel like he didn’t want to be in the corner. But like I said, we developed a system where we play around everybody, and we just had to figure out how to incorporate him. But after what happened yesterday, we’re focused on who’s with us now.”
After the second of those games earlier in the week, Butler said “probably not” when asked if he thought he could find on-court joy again in Miami.
Saying those two words may have been his last official act as a member of the Heat. A week or so ago, Miami had no interest in trading Butler. Hearing him say that he doesn’t want to be on the team anymore evidently changed things.
“It’s hard to not see him around,” Jovic said.
