Jimmy Butler sounds like he’s losing his joy again. That didn’t take long. Butler has played 60 games with the Warriors, including last year’s postseason, and already he’s at his wits’ end with a .500 team that leans almost entirely on Stephen Curry turning into Superman to win games.
“We’re gonna have to be damn near perfect,” Butler said of Golden State’s chances of surviving without Curry, who is going to be out at least a week with a quad contusion. “We’re not going to have the ultimate bail-out on our team.”
“But even when [Curry] is on the floor, we’re going to have to do our job because we make the game real difficult,” Butler continued. “As great of a basketball player as he is, he has a really hard job. Every single day he’s gotta be the Batman of all Batmans and save us every night. That ain’t what he’s here to do.”
Butler was then asked to elaborate on what the Warriors do, in his estimation, to make “make the game hard” for themselves, and he rattled off a list of ills that have clearly been getting on his nerves for a while.
“We don’t box out. We don’t go with the scouting report. We let anybody do whatever they want. Open shots. Get into the paint. Free throws. It’s just sad.”
You be the judge for yourself, but this does not sound like a happy Jimmy Butler, whose, shall we say, enthusiasm for his current NBA situation has always had an expiration date.
So here’s the thing: Butler isn’t wrong. Curry righting all of Golden State’s wrongs with nuclear scoring explosions is not a formula for sustained success. It’s nice to have that ace up your sleeve, but no, you cannot be reaching for it every night. The Warriors are 10-10 and at least three of those wins are a direct result of Curry saving the day.
First he went for 42, including 35 after halftime, in an overtime victory vs. the Nuggets in the first week of the season. The Warriors had no business winning that game. Curry scored 16 straight points over a six-minute surge spanning the end of the fourth quarter and the start of overtime. All told, he outscored the Nuggets by himself, 18-15, from the 2:42 mark of the fourth forward. He had to sink this shot to get the game to overtime in the first place.
A couple of weeks ago, Curry basically single-handedly lifted the Warriors over Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs twice in three nights by rattling off 95 points and 15 3-pointers. Again, this is a great option to have. Any good team, let alone one aspiring to be a contender, has a superstar who needs to save the day once in a while.
But the Warriors are supposed to have two superstars. You see what I’m getting at here?
Butler is quick to call out all these things the Warriors aren’t doing well, which, again, he’s not wrong about, but conveniently, we’re not hearing anything about Golden State’s 110.3 offensive rating when Butler is on the floor without Curry, which would rank as the fifth-worst mark in the league.
I know the rebuttal to this point. The Warriors are still a net positive when Butler is on the floor without Curry because of a 90th percentile defensive rating, per Cleaning the Glass, and it’s true that Curry’s defense isn’t what it once was in terms of staying in front of people, so as much as Curry saves the day offensively, he’s at the point now where he’s the one getting bailed out a lot of the time defensively.
Still, that’s not the larger point. Curry going nuclear is still the only hope this team has, and it shouldn’t be that way. Prior to the season, I picked the Warriors to go to the Finals, and even though that’s not looking like a very good call barring a trade (which is probably going to happen for Jonathan Kuminga once he’s eligible to be moved on Jan. 15), the larger point is that optimism was rooted in the idea that Butler, after acclimating himself over the last half of last season, would be willing to stretch his scoring comfort zone.
Maybe he will in the playoffs, assuming the Warriors actually qualify (he’s known to coast, relatively, during the regular season). But the problem is the Warriors don’t have the leeway for him to be just another player basking in the Steph space until the last leg of the season when, as it looks now, the Warriors will again be fighting for their lives.
Butler’s numbers look great, admittedly: 20 PPG on 53/46/87 shooting splits. The Warriors are 12.8 points better per 100 possessions when he’s on the floor, per CTG. None of this is meant to suggest that Butler is not a positive player. He clearly is. And then some.
But look at the defensive numbers when Draymond Green isn’t with him. It’s the same story as the offense when Curry isn’t with him. Rock-bottom stuff. If Butler doesn’t want things to be so hard on Curry, perhaps stepping out of his comfort zone and actually pursuing, consistently and forcefully, his own offense instead of being happy to only take super efficient shots created by Curry running himself ragged and taking entire defenses with him would be a good place to start.
See, that’s the hollow part of directing this thinly veiled criticism at the Brandin Podziemskis and Moses Moodys of the world. They’re role players for a reason. They’re already up against the threshold of their abilities.
To suggest the Warriors are a bottom-10 defense because they don’t pay attention to the scouting report isn’t genuine. From a personnel standpoint, they don’t have great on-ball defenders and they’re incredibly small on the back end, which is also why they aren’t a good rebounding team.
Yes, boxing out can help. Sticking to the scouting report is important. But basketball doesn’t happen on paper. There are gaps that happen in real time that have to be covered by players capable of doing so. Curry does it offensively. Green does it defensively. But that’s only enough to keep the Warriors treading water.
To actually start making some progress toward the tier of contenders in which the Warriors believe they belong, Butler has to do more. And to do more, he has to be willing to go outside his comfort zone. The simple truth is he operates offensively like every other role player on the Warriors, seizing opportunities created by someone else as opposed to creating them for himself. The only difference is that he’s better at playing this way than the actual role players.
It’s become a Butler schtick to say “just get 30 the ball” as if that’s all there is to playing for the Warriors. That’s how life ends up being so hard on Curry, and ultimately, that’s how you end up with a bottom-10 offense.
Butler isn’t getting paid $57 million this season to “get 30 the ball.” He’s not supposed to be the so-called “star in his role.” He’s supposed to be an actual star. Klay Thompson understood Curry was Batman, but he was still hunting his offense. Different player, yes. But Butler’s mentality could be the same. Thompson was a true No. 2. — a guy who could, would, and oftentimes did assume the alpha role in the biggest moments.
Butler is too happy to stay in his lane. The Warriors need him to drive, so to speak, more aggressively, even at the risk of crashing here and there. Take some tough shots. Force some plays that maybe aren’t there. It sounds strange to encourage a less measured and careful approach on team that already turns the ball over like crazy, but when the alternative is giving equal opportunity to players who aren’t of equal ability, you’re going to end up levying blame onto the wrong shoulders.
Kuminga, for instance, catches all kinds of hell for all these little things he maybe doesn’t do so well — and again, it’s not to suggest there isn’t merit in these critiques (although I won’t listen to anyone who suggests he hasn’t been overall very good when he’s played this season). But when Curry went down in the second round of the playoffs, and the Warriors couldn’t create consistent shots to save their life, who was the one asserting himself as a scorer? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t Butler.
There was a built-in excuse that Butler wasn’t healthy himself, but that would pretend he hadn’t become a much more passive scorer in the latter Miami years, too. He wants to get in the paint and kick out and draw fouls and take easy shots when they present themselves. This is great when Curry’s cooking, but Butler is the one saying, correctly, that the Warriors can’t keep relying on that.
So what can the Warriors start doing differently? Pay attention to all the details Butler suggests, sure. But in the end, they’re going to be a small team that struggles to defend at the point of attack and only has Curry to lean on offensively. Butler himself says that isn’t enough.
So you can either ask more of guys who aren’t equipped to give more, or you can ask the guy making superstar money to do more than simply take what the defense and Curry give him. Maybe he’s not capable of being that player anymore. But he has to try. Especially if he’s going to be the one holding everyone else accountable.