He’s 33, started late as a four-year college player and missed chunks of time in the middle he’s never going to amass the type of counting stats that blow people away. It’s especially important if Butler doesn’t get another chance to play this late into spring. (Usually, teams are eliminated long before they can complete a seven-losses-in-nine-games run.) That Miami will possibly end this year with the difficult feat of losing seven times in nine games doesn’t help either only the 1994 Utah Jazz have closed a postseason with a 2-7 kick. He has never won a championship and has accumulated limited regular-season accolades, factors that could hurt him when it comes to things like Hall of Fame selection and placement on the top-100-or-whatever of all-time lists. This could end up important when it comes to history’s viewpoint of Butler. Yes, Miami still won in seven, but the narrative flipped to Jayson Tatum’s ankle and the Celtics’ assorted imperfections. It would have been the exclamation point to a heroic postseason run, one that would have dragged the eighth-seeded Heat to a Cinderella appearance in the NBA Finals … until Derrick White’s game-winning tip-in at the buzzer made it for naught. His three free throws put Miami ahead in Game 6 against Boston, the culmination of a dominating stretch run in which he scored 13 points in the final four minutes and led Miami from 10 down to take a lead with 3.0 seconds left. A year ago, it was Butler’s pull-up from 3 that went just awry to allow Boston to survive as East champions.įittingly, Butler was robbed of a historic moment again this year. He has been a massive protagonist in four of the last five postseasons, and we might view him much differently if he hadn’t come up on the wrong end of two all-time almost-famous moments.Īs a Sixer, Butler produced the coast-to-coast slalom that tied Game 7 in Toronto in 2019, setting the stage for Kawhi Leonard’s legendary four-bouncer at the buzzer. (OK, I exaggerate … slightly.)Īnd yet, every spring Butler demonstrates that he is quite clearly one of the best players in the league. He has only once shot better than 50 percent from the field. It goes on: He has only once played more than 70 games in a season. Until he won the Larry Bird Trophy for Eastern Conference finals MVP this season, Butler’s most notable “black ink” accomplishment was winning Eastern Conference Player of the Month in November 2014. He has never finished higher than 10th in MVP voting and has received only one, single top-three MVP vote, lifetime, out of the hundred ballots cast every year. He has never made first-team All-NBA or really come close his second-team finish this year is the best he’s ever done. He hasn’t led the league in any important category except steals, just once. In fact, there is no cognitive dissonance quite like looking at Butler’s page. This season was a perfect example: He had the best year of his career but didn’t make the All-Star team and finished 22nd in scoring. Yet when you try to list his tangible accomplishments in 280 characters, it gets harder to build a concise, compelling case for his place in the pantheon. Butler is a visceral, dominant force in nearly every playoff game in which he participates, particularly in the final minutes.
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