'Jimmy hasn't even really started': Inside the simmering feud between Butler and the Heat

IF THERE HADN’T been a massive falling out with superstar forward Jimmy Butler the week before, every question Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra took on the morning of Jan. 9 would’ve seemed perfectly appropriate.

The team’s win in Golden State the night before. Tyler Herro‘s All-Star bid. Jaime Jaquez Jr.’s growth as a second-year player. All standard fare for a post-practice interview for a middle-of-the-pack team in the middle of a West Coast road trip in early January.

But, of course, nothing about this Thursday morning availability in Salt Lake City was typical. Just six days earlier, the Heat had announced they were suspending Butler for conduct detrimental to the team after a 13-point loss to the Indiana Pacers in which questions about their six-time All-Star’s effort emerged.

It had been messy, a league- and franchise-altering blow-up, one that could cost Butler $2.3 million in salary and presents the biggest existential test to the vaunted “Heat Culture” in decades.

Back in Utah, no questions about Butler were asked because the Heat had made it clear Spoelstra wouldn’t answer them. The point of timing the seven-game suspension with the six-game road trip, team sources said, was to create space for the team to get out of Miami and away from the chaos the situation had created, while Butler, Heat president Pat Riley and Heat owner Micky Arison met to talk through their differences.

It was a futile effort. Starving this situation of oxygen was going to work for only so long, and the issues that caused the relationship to disintegrate remain. Butler still wants to be traded. The Heat haven’t found a trade they like for him.

Teammates, coaches and staffers have already grown weary, sources said.

While Heat sources say they expect Butler to return Friday against the Nuggets and are fully prepared for him to play, there remains a palpable dread at what he might do and the environment the ongoing chaos might create. “I don’t know how he can come back to this locker room,” one source close to the team said. Said another, “We don’t want him back.”

If history — like, say, in Minnesota in 2018 — serves as precedent, the discomfort could deepen, quickly.

“Jimmy hasn’t even really started,” said one source close to Butler.

Spoelstra knew all of that as he politely declined to discuss Butler’s situation. Of course he knew. Everyone on the team knew how much was still unresolved and how much uglier this could get.

What Spoelstra would discuss is “Heat Culture.” What it is — and what it means. It also provided him with an opening to provide a statement in easily decipherable code.

“There’s an expectation of how we compete and how we compete for each other,” Spoelstra said. “Off the court, there’s a level of professionalism and a standard there.”

Riley created the culture when he joined the franchise in 1995. Spoelstra, who joined the Heat that same summer, sees himself as a caretaker of it. His players, too.

It is a living, breathing ideal that changes with each team and its leaders. And it’s being challenged like never before, by a player who once embodied it. An organization set in its ways, with three decades of receipts proving its efficacy — and a player, 14 years into his career, famously set in his.

“We’re not for everyone,” Spoelstra said. “Some people are drawn to it, some people aren’t. We’re not making apologies for it.”

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ON SOME LEVEL, nobody involved should be surprised that this once-perfect basketball marriage between player and team — a sport-defining culture and militant work ethic with the Heat, and an All-Star wing in Butler who independently embodied both — has hit the rocks.

Riley and Butler are both prideful, pugnacious and competitive as hell. Eventually, personalities like that crash into each other.

Butler’s stints in Chicago, Minnesota and Philadelphia all ended with varying degrees of rancor. Riley has gotten sideways with superstars such as Shaquille O’Neal, Dwyane Wade and Alonzo Mourning at certain points.

This current dust-up is, for now, tame compared to what each man has done in the past. Butler’s exit from Minnesota is legendary. So, too, is Riley’s fight with O’Neal at a practice in February 2008 when Mourning stepped between them to stop an all-out brawl.

Those fights were mostly over performance. This one is mostly over money, which equates to respect in the minds of superstar players and can lead to much messier, more emotional breakups.

Wade and Riley’s fallout in 2016 began with what team sources now admit was a mistake in how they handled the departure of LeBron James as a free agent in 2014. James waited seven days to make the decision to return to Cleveland, which left the Heat with unexpected cap space.

The Heat chose to re-sign Chris Bosh to a five-year, $118 million max contract and fill other holes on the roster, leaving Wade with an insultingly low two-year, $31 million contract.

“We should’ve just given as much as we could to Dwyane,” one Heat source said. “That set things up to go bad later.”

When Wade left for Chicago in 2016 after receiving a lesser contract offer from a still cap-restricted Miami, Heat executives resolved never to make the same mistake again. When the Heat acquired Butler via a sign-and-trade with the Sixers in 2019, that institutional memory was strong.

“To be totally honest, we said all the time that DWade died so that [Jimmy] could live,” one source close to Butler said.

That meant letting Butler, who was 30 at the time, color outside the lines that had long defined “Heat Culture.” They hired his trainer, Armando Rivas, onto the staff — a common practice for other superstars on other teams but not for the Heat. He skipped team Christmas parties and trolled the NBA media with eclectic hair styles at media days. He was allowed to fly privately or stay at a different location than the team on road trips. During the 2023 Finals, sources said, he stayed some 30 miles away at a mansion in Boulder, Colorado, while the team stayed in downtown Denver.

“That is not common at all,” one Western Conference GM said. “A superstar might stay at a different hotel but not at a mansion 30 miles away.”

Butler did little to hide his unusual arrangement — even posting photos from a Van Leeuwen ice cream shop in Boulder to his ever-buzzing Instagram account during the Finals.

“We let Jimmy do more than we ever let LeBron or DWade or Zo do,” one team source said.

Privately, alumni and staffers started to express concern at how much leeway the Heat were giving Butler. But nobody dared speak publicly after he led the team to two Finals appearances in four years.

If anything, the lesson learned from Wade meant rewarding Butler financially before he could ever grow salty, which the Heat did by offering him a four-year, maximum $184 million extension in August 2021.

But when it came time to extend him again, with a two-year, $113 million deal this past summer, after an early exit in the playoffs, the Heat balked.

Riley explained why at his news conference after the season in May.

“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,” Riley said, referencing Butler’s average of playing just 64% of the team’s regular-season games. “That’s the truth.”

He also took the opportunity to chastise Butler for saying the Heat would have beaten the Boston Celtics or New York Knicks if he hadn’t hurt his right knee.

“If you’re not on the court playing against Boston or on the court playing against the New York Knicks,” Riley said. “You should keep your mouth shut.”

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BUTLER WAS STUNNED when he heard Riley’s rebuke, according to sources close to him, who claim Riley hadn’t communicated that directly to him before, and believed it was incumbent on Riley to “make it right” afterward.

Heat officials dispute this claim, saying Riley spoke with Butler on multiple occasions since.

A rift had clearly formed, and sides were being chosen.

To Heat lifers such as Wade, Riley’s words were a needed correction.

“The stuff we hear as former players, we don’t like it. We didn’t get away with that s—,” Wade said on his podcast, “The Way,” on Jan. 15. “Tim Hardaway, Zo, [Udonis Haslem], [Quentin Richardson], we were all looking at Riles going, what’s going on over there? We’re used to iron fist! We don’t hear and we don’t feel iron fist going on over there.

“When you’re in it, you don’t want it. You think you want to go somewhere else. But then when you get out of it, you realize that that structure, that iron fist kept you in line. “

There’s a big difference between Wade and Butler, however. Wade was drafted by the Heat and came into the league at 21. He formed his NBA identity in Miami. Butler was 30 when he joined the organization and had already established his NBA identity.

There was a healthy overlap at first, as Butler’s self-discipline and intensity fit well with Riley’s. The 2020 run to the Finals in the Orlando, Florida, bubble was proof of concept.

But it soon became clear this was just a nice collaboration, not a union built to last.

“When I look at the organization, a lot of the top guys have left because we ran into that guy,” Wade said of Riley. “And when you run into that guy, in Miami, you see who wins.”

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IN LATE JULY 2023, Udonis Haslem, the Heat’s longest-tenured player, retired after 20 seasons in Miami. For the past eight, though, he’d barely played, relegated to the bench to play a different role: to both promote and protect the culture he’d helped build, one that had fueled seven NBA Finals appearances and three championships. He was, quietly, the team’s captain.

His departure created an opening to be the leader of one of the NBA’s most iconic, stable franchises.

Riley and Spoelstra canvassed the organization, looking for a new keeper of the flame.

It was unanimous, sources said. Everyone believed 26-year-old Bam Adebayo would be the right choice to carry on the legacy.

Riley called him in for a meeting before the 2023-24 season to bestow the honor and make sure he understood the responsibility.

Butler, who had just completed his fourth season in Miami and led the team to two NBA Finals, wasn’t upset by this choice, sources close to him said, but it did serve as validation. He might be the Heat’s best player, but it wasn’t truly his team. Adebayo and young guard Tyler Herro were the Heat’s future, not him.

The disconnect only grew. On the court, Butler began to believe that the Heat were prioritizing Adebayo and Herro over him, sources close to Butler said. They were the hub of the offense, and he was just supposed to run down to the corner and be ready to drive or shoot a 3-pointer.

The numbers tell a conflicting tale. Butler’s usage rate this season is indeed his lowest since the 2013-14 season. But he’s shooting 55.2%, the best mark of his career, including 58% inside the arc. The Heat are 6-3 when Butler scores at least 20 points, with all three losses coming by 3 points or fewer.

Ostensibly the Heat had made these adjustments because Butler had missed 26% of the team’s regular-season games, and every team in the NBA is focused on shooting more, which is not Butler’s strength. While he’s shooting 37.5% on 3s this season, he’s attempting just 1.5 3-pointers per game, his lowest mark since he was a reserve in Chicago. But Butler didn’t like what he believed was a reduced role in the offense — how it felt or what it represented.

“If they’re doing this transition to Bam and Tyler, Jimmy’s like, ‘Fine, do your transition,'” a source close to Butler said. “If [he’s] going to be the second or third wheel, [he’ll] be that in Phoenix to Kevin Durant and Devin Booker.”

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THE IDEA THAT Butler could orchestrate his exit from Miami and to a preferred destination is both audacious and perfectly on brand. The Suns are in salary cap purgatory, having brashly plowed over the second apron with their trades for Durant and Bradley Beal in the past two seasons.

They have virtually no assets to send out in trades, and the only player whose salary matches Butler’s is Beal, who has a no-trade clause and $110.7 million still owed to him. Beal, sources close to him said, has steadfastly maintained he wants to hold on to his no-trade clause, even if he ever approves a trade from Phoenix. He has three young children and values the stability the no-trade clause affords his family, sources said.

That was a nonstarter for the Heat back in 2023 when they looked into acquiring him from the Washington Wizards, sources said, and remains that way today. Thus, a third or fourth team — one that would be amenable to acquiring Beal and his no-trade clause — would be required, furthering the level of difficulty.

But Butler has made a career out of bending the universe to his prodigious will. That’s how he made it out of homelessness as a child, to Marquette and then the NBA.

“He’s always going to see how far he can push you,” a close friend of Butler’s said. “But he wants you to push him back. If you don’t stand up to it, he doesn’t respect you.”

The push began in the first half of a Dec. 20 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. Butler went to the locker room because of a sprained ankle but left the arena because he reported to the team’s medical staff that he was feeling sick. He didn’t play the next night in Orlando. Or on Dec. 23 at home against Brooklyn. Or Dec. 26 back in Orlando.

Some team officials began to regard Butler as somewhat AWOL, sources said. Butler’s side contends he was communicating his status through his agent, Bernie Lee, and training staff.

The tensions heightened as Butler’s social media activity picked up. On the 26th, while the team was playing in Orlando and he was officially listed as out because of illness, Butler posted a video of him playing soccer with former Manchester United star Paul Pogba, both looking healthy and spry.

Three days later, while the team was on the road in Houston and he was officially listed as “reconditioning,” he posted a video of himself playing dominoes in the team locker room with Lee.

Each post was seen by team officials as an affront, an attempt to make the situation more uncomfortable, sources said.

When Butler finally rejoined the team for practice after missing five games, he displayed what one team official called “a very poor attitude” and spent most of his time sitting in the corner.

His play and comments after both games he played left little doubt as to his feelings.

“I want to see me getting my joy back playing basketball. Wherever that may be, we’ll find out here pretty soon,” he told reporters after the loss to the Pacers on Jan. 2. “I’m happy here off the court, but I want to be back to somewhat dominant, I want to hoop and I want to help this team win, and right now I’m not doing it.”

Asked if he could get his joy back on the court with the Heat, Butler said, “Probably not.”

The Heat had had enough. Riley released a statement outlining the terms of a seven-game suspension.

“Through his actions and statements, he has shown he no longer wants to be part of this team,” the statement said. “Jimmy Butler and his representative have indicated that they wish to be traded, therefore, we will listen to offers.”

Butler, sources close to him said, was furious at the length of the suspension and the potential $2.3 million in lost salary (the National Basketball Players Association has filed a grievance).

While Spoelstra and the rest of the team were in Utah, trying to avenge an embarrassing 36-point loss at home to the tanking Jazz, Riley and Butler met to discuss the Heat’s intentions with the suspension and fine, sources said. Butler strongly reiterated his trade request, as ESPN’s Shams Charania reported.

There had been some possibility that the meeting could have resulted in a reduced suspension and fine for Butler, sources said, but Butler would have had to show “a lot more contrition,” one source said.

Instead, he doubled down, in person with Riley and then publicly in an Instagram post hours later that showed him complimenting a barista at his Big Face Coffee store in Miami.

“This is our best guy right here,” Butler said. “See, I gave you a compliment. That’s what bosses do, they build you up. … They don’t break you down.”