Unsatisfied that the Miami Heat didn't get the hint the first or second times around, Jimmy Butler finally just said it on Thursday night: He wants a trade. The permanently aggrieved Heat forward has been especially aggrieved this season after the team didn't offer him an extension on his big honking contract this past summer, so despite the Heat actually playing some decent basketball, he's done with them.
The shape of this superstar trade demand mostly adheres to the standards of the form, but things could get weird in the month remaining between now and the trading deadline. These are the Miami Heat and Jimmy Butler we're talking about here, two forces whose stubbornness is only matched by their performance of obstinance.
After his team lost to the Indiana Pacers Thursday night, and he shot six times in 26 minutes en route to a shambolic minus-27, Butler met with the press and let the Heat have it. A reporter asked Butler what he wanted to happen, and, to his credit, he answered. "I want to see me getting my joy back playing basketball," Butler said. "Wherever that may be, we'll find out here pretty soon. 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."
That's mostly correct. The Heat are tied with the Bucks for fifth in the East, though despite Tyler Herro's career season, their highest level is pretty clearly not high enough to actually get anyone to take them seriously as a contender. Miami didn't improve its roster this past offseason, nor has it done so at any point since losing the 2023 Damian Lillard sweepstakes. That stagnation partially explains Butler's frustration. The operative factor in Butler's discontent, however, is clearly money: He's in the final guaranteed year of a huge extension he signed in 2021, and he has a player option for $52 million next season. The Heat made the cold, correct basketball decision not to offer him an extension off of his current deal, as Butler is 35 and in some degree of decline.
The precise angle of that decline is up for debate, since Butler led the team to the Finals two seasons ago and has been phoning it in most of this season. Whether the 2024–25 Butler or the 2022–23 Butler is the real guy, neither is worth $52 million under the league's repressive, owner-friendly collective bargaining agreement; in either case, the aging curve for undersized, physicality-dependent guys who don't shoot is brutal. As impressive as Butler producing at a super-high level despite an increasingly anachronistic game may be, it's hard to imagine any team getting the most out of him if he's a complementary player, especially because that team will have to pay him like the superstar he no longer is.
This is the bummer of the CBA: It is extremely hostile to decline. Butler has said he'll waive his huge player option for 2025–26 if traded, which gives him leverage at least over the Heat, who do not want to use one-third of the salary cap on a 36-year-old who has been at war with them for a year. The question, then, is where he could go.
That brings us to my favorite characters in the saga, ESPN's Shams Charania and Butler's mouthy agent Bernie Lee. Charania reported on Dec. 11 that Butler and Lee were putting the word out that he'd like to be traded to Dallas, Houston, Golden State, or Phoenix, which prompted Lee to write a trio of angry tweets calling Charania a hack and a fraud. "If you don’t stop putting my name on your complete and utter made up bullshit because you know you normally aren't worth my time to acknowledge," Lee wrote across two separate tweets, apparently unaware of Twitter's threading function. "I don’t know what I’m going to do because I'm a middle aged dad but just know it would indicate severe dislike." That's A) a beautifully mangled tribute to the post-language stylings of Charania, and B) bizarrely counterproductive. The enemy is Heat president Pat Riley, not Shams, and while Lee (whose hilarious client list is Butler, Kris Dunn, and Ben Simmons) surely knows a public trade demand is messy, he should also know that Charania is a conduit for league business and that he's ultimately serving his best interests.
On Christmas Day, Charania reported that Butler wanted a trade, clarifying (well, sort of) that he hadn't yet asked for one, "but is believed to be ready for his exit." Heat president Pat Riley then took the highly unusual step of making an unambiguous public statement: "We usually don't comment on rumors, but all this speculation has become a distraction to the team and is not fair to the players and coaches. Therefore, we will make it clear—We are not trading Jimmy Butler."
If Butler were simply to be a free agent after the season, the Heat would probably be totally fine sticking to their word, not trading him, and letting him walk this summer. But he can easily ruin the organization's 2025–26 campaign by exercising his right to $52 million in salary. The leverage he has over the Heat is his own decline, which is both very funny and indicative of why he probably doesn't have much of a trade market. Why would the Rockets or Mavericks, two youngish teams on the rise, give up real stuff for a guy who doesn't really fit with their teams? Why would Phoenix and Golden State—two ancient teams with undisputed first-option geniuses, already experiencing the pains of over-leveraging themselves—dig themselves further into a hole for a guy who doesn't shoot the basketball? It's ugly in every direction, is my point, and all of it is downstream of the rotten CBA.
