MIAMI — Jimmy Butler says he needs to find joy again on the basketball court. And when asked if he can find that joy in Miami, he had a two-word answer.
“Probably not,” he said.
The relationship between Butler and the Heat — a talking point for weeks now — seems to have further deteriorated. on Thursday night, Butler scoring exactly nine points and playing exactly zero seconds in the fourth quarter for the second consecutive game. It also happened Wednesday in a win over New Orleans.
“What do I want to see happen? I want to see me get my joy back from playing basketball,” Butler said. “Wherever that may be — we’ll find out here pretty soon — but I want to get my joy back. I’m happy here, off the court, but I want to be back to somewhere dominant. I want to hoop and I want to help this team win. Right now, I’m not doing that.”
Butler has not asked for a trade — ESPN reported on Christmas Day that he would prefer a trade by the Feb. 6 deadline — and the Heat took the rather unusual step last week after that report of
Thursday’s game was, obviously, not a typical Butler performance. He spent many possessions largely camped in the corner on offense and took only six shots in 27 minutes; he took five shots from the floor on Wednesday. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra basically made Butler the point guard for parts of the third quarter in an effort to spark things. It didn’t work.
“Obviously he’s frustrated, because he’s standing on the corner,” Heat captain Bam Adebayo said. “So, he’s got a lot of things going on in his corner. For us, we keep the main thing the main thing like our coach always tells us. We play to win and that’s what it’s all about.”
Butler said he felt like he was focused and that he did his job Thursday, adding “or at least, what my job is now.”
“That’s not what I’m used to being,” Butler said. “I haven’t been that since my first, second, third year in the league, where I just went out there and played defense. I competed. I guarded. That’s what I’m doing now.”
Butler was the best player on two Heat teams that went to the NBA Finals. He was eligible for a two-year, $113 million extension starting last summer and Miami has yet to offer a new deal to the 35-year-old. Butler has a $52 million player option for next season or could leave Miami in free agency this summer — if he remains with the team past the trade deadline.
Spoelstra has said multiple times that he wants Butler in Miami and said he believes the back-to-back nine-point games are due in part to Butler missing nearly two weeks with an illness. Wednesday was Butler’s first game back after that stretch.
“It’s about being aggressive,” Spoelstra said, speaking before Butler’s postgame comments. “We’ve got to figure it out. I’ll figure it out. He’s got to figure it out, too. We’ve got to figure it out.”
Butler insisted that he will continue competing.
“I’m going out there to compete to win, either way, whether I score nine points or 29 points,” Butler said. “I will compete. That’s one thing that I will say. You won’t say that I’m out there not playing hard. It may look like that because my usage is down and I don’t shoot the ball a lot, but we won’t sit here and say I don’t play hard.”
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