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Tag Archives: Jimmy Butler

You Know You Sometimes Lie

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February 3, 2025
America, Basketball, NBA, Olympics
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“I don’t do anything that’s scary.” – Nico Harrison, Dallas Mavericks general manager, February 2nd, 2025, right after taking one of the wildest, most inexplicable swings in NBA history.

Firstly, no: I have no idea why the Dallas Mavericks would do this, “this” being trading Luka Dončić for Anthony Davis, which is exactly what they did late Saturday night. Secondly, yes: I do think LeBron and Luka can work it out as an oversized Tatum-Brown spanning generations and leading a dynamite offense, if only anybody on the Lakers could defend anymore. 

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Promises, Promises

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June 18, 2024
America, Basketball, NBA
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It’s about Jaylen and Jayson, to be clear, but we’ll return to them. Everybody else involved with this Celtics run made it possible. To follow the blueprint for what the Spurs and Sixers were looking for in essence, and then pull it off as efficiently as they did, has to be maddening to detractors. Nevertheless, Boston was the best team in the league all season. It turns out: that means all season.

After seven years of will-they, won’t-they together, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum finally put it together, albeit with the help of Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, as well as mainstays returned or otherwise in Al Horford, Peyton Pritchard, Sam Hauser and Derrick White. Brad Stevens ran his game on the rest of the NBA. Now, finally, the Boston Celtics are the NBA champions.

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(Approximately) 30 Thoughts On 30 NBA Teams, 2023-’24 Edition

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October 24, 2023
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Welcome back. Depending on how you count the attempt at satire written in the midst of an early life crisis in 2014, and with apologies to the time in between the 2019-’20 season and 2020-’21 – spacing more questionable than the 2013-’14 Knicks, incidentally, but with a much more logical explanation – this is the tenth time we’ll be previewing every NBA team, so for those of you here from the jump, I must express some measure of appreciation.

A reminder, and a reintroduction: if you don’t know but you’ve been here this long, Robert Horry’s name is pronounced with a silent-H (‘Orry). His name is his name. He has more rings than Jordan, if that’s your thing, and he hit several of the most important shots in league history, with apologies only via volume in both directions to Kings fans and the Kyrie hive. 

Getting back to the point: you heard about him for years in the French leagues too, right? And even before that? Ah, so you saw what his wingspan could end up being? Not unlike the Burger King jingle that mutates each fortnight but remains an earsore in every iteration, the midseason tournament is coming for all of us: growth is the only mindset.

Watch your own fire burn as mine does. A model like yours? Nothing better. Just you wait and see:

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Loud, Fast, And Keep Going

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May 29, 2023
America, Basketball, Music, NBA, Pop Culture
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Happy Memorial Day! Great to see you! So, now that you’re here, it’s time to attack: Do you ever think about instigators, or why a lot of people die unnecessarily? Did you see the BARRY finale? What do you fear the most, and why is it the mirror? Anyway, haha, *high five*, let’s honor some of what we thought were the dead, but they’re still living.

Jimmy Butler has fulfilled his mission and obligation as The Man for the Miami Heat. Via the way the game is played today, et cetera, he found himself at the foul line with three seconds to go, the exact three seconds and three shots he needed to close out the Boston Celtics and end any speculation that the best-positioned team in NBA history to recover from down 3-0 would do so. He nailed all three, Michelobs surely on the brain.

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Something’s Heating Up!

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April 28, 2023
America, Basketball, NBA, Sports
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This past Christmas, I was in Oklahoma with my oldest, not older, brother, taking in several of the NBA games that were on TV. They were there at my request, but several of our fellow patrons got into it; suffice to say, we identified a Kobe Guy. Two days later we would be at Paycom watching a Thunder-Spurs game that you’ve already forgotten; I doubt we ever will.

For what ended up being my family’s ad hoc Christmas celebration three months later, we descended upon South Carolina, my parents once again hosting a St. Patrick’s Day party featuring a lot of people I don’t know that well. One of them, a New Jersey transplant and lapsed Knicks fan, unfortunately found herself in a conversation with me, all but yelling at her about Jalen Brunson. 

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(Approximately) 30 Thoughts On 30 NBA Teams, 2022-’23 Edition

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October 18, 2022
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Not so fast – To focus on the “sudden” rush to the bottom for Victor Wembanyama and, especially after their recent matchup on national TV, Scoot Henderson is to overlook what lies directly before us this NBA season. In what was bound to be a year of questions surrounding contenders, we’ve returned to another slate full of them. 

In any case, we return, steeled to run directly into the fire. Who knows what awaits this caravan? New stats, new players, a continuous flow of publicly-available scandals: it isn’t all here, but we’ll make do. Forget STOCKS, or AST:TO ratio. The new way to identify player efficacy is assists+steals+blocks divided by/turnovers. Get used to it, identify your new Point Gawd, and get ready for tip-off.

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The Andrew Wiggins Power Hour

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June 16, 2022
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Some of this is chatter; some of it is Mike Breen’s idiosyncratic delivery (courtesy of his alma mater, obviously). The Golden State Warriors enter Game 6 of the NBA Finals with a chance to win their fourth title in eight years largely because of the former number one overall pick, a tweener-ish guy left to falter but by the grace of God, Kevin Durant, and Bob Myers.

Former number one overall pick Andrew Wiggins had a night in Game 5, delivering 26 points and 13 rebounds in a 104-94 victory over the Boston Celtics. It put the Warriors up 3-2, which isn’t even a threatening games lead for Golden State; you know, when the Warriors did go up 3-1. You know how that goes.

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Lake Show Coast To Coast

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October 12, 2020
Basketball, race, Sports
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Why LeBron James and the Lakers' 2020 NBA championship is the storied franchise's most special one yet - CBSSports.com

On Sunday, arguably the greatest player ever stepped in, hunkered down and defeated a worthy opponent, one whose run in recent months has faced heavy skepticism and much detraction. Though the favored prevailed, there was enough seeded doubt to keep things interesting. As it stood, however, the king remained the king, until further notice.

Indeed, the Los Angeles Lakers won their sixteenth NBA championship and seventeenth as a franchise since 1946, tying the Boston Celtics for the most of any franchise, with LeBron James claiming his fourth title and fourth Finals MVP. If he isn’t already there, Anthony Davis is very nearly at a point where his Hall of Fame candidacy is ensured at 27. Against the tapestry of a global pandemic and election year tensions stateside, the NBA committed to the bubble, and the Lakers committed to defense in Game 6. Sometimes, it seems, lockdowns work.

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A Berry To Drive Away Fatigue And Lethargy

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September 28, 2020
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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5412245 1916x1272 #coffee, #coffee cup, #steam, #red cup, #blur, #Public domain images, #tea, #morning, #drink, #hot drink, #coffee mug, #red, #bokeh, #warm, #rising steam, #close up, #hot, #mug, #cup | Mocah.org HD

Long before it was the juice that fueled your disappointing Zoom meetings, coffee was a delight of the Arabian Peninsula. It might delight people to know that the word “coffee” is itself derived from a word originally given to a type of wine, at least in many common interpretations; what somebody saw in both was appetite suppression. Fair enough.

It might be curious, then, to learn that the Miami Heat’s Jimmy Butler started selling homespun coffee in the NBA bubble under the moniker Big Face Coffee. For $20 a pop, any resident of the bubble could have a taste, courtesy of a five-time NBA All-Star. Butler is one of the most notoriously hard workers in the league, and, as such, his appetite has never come into question. On Sunday night, and with a stupendous amount of help from Bam Adebayo – who, it’s worth noting, hates Butler’s pricing strategy –  and company, he pushed the Miami Heat into the NBA Finals, ready to stand up to LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers.

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On Chasing Waterfalls

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June 28, 2019
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Image result for red rover game vintage

“Rover, Red Rover” – Arthur Leipzig

Free agency in professional sports, in its ideal form, is the best and most prominent example of the free market at work that exists in this country. A worker earns their keep; their employer either decides that they are or are not worth the trouble, and then there are suitors everywhere lining up to give that person their just deserts. It’s deceptively simple.

Yet – and that word does a percentage of the salary cap’s worth of lifting here – it is much more deceptive than simple. The salary cap itself is one measure of inequality-via-equality; were LeBron James ever paid as much as he deserved in his career, he would likely be rivaling Gaius Appuleius Diocles at this point. Alas, at least in salary-capped leagues[1], the reality is thus: make what you can of what you have, and be judicious with your forecasts. A tornado doesn’t have to spring up to be destructive; if it gets you to move, it’s done enough of its job.

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