It is almost sad that this week will likely be remembered as the Luka Doncic trade deadline, if only because the single weirdest trade of the week and maybe the decade happened four days later. That one involved more teams, players, personalities, and wrecked preconceptions than the one that saw the Mavericks bail on their generational star. Which is why the gods in their infinite chicaneries came up with this four-torsoed, five-headed beauty that centers around the skull-melting notion of Jimmy Butler, Stephen Curry, and Draymond Green as teammates for what might be their last serious run at incandescence.
The Doncic-Anthony Davis deal, which nobody saw coming on Saturday and still inspires conspiracy theories about who screwed whom and for what reasons this long after the deal, has the advantage both of happening first and involving the Los Angeles Lakers. But before there was Luka—before anyone other than Miriam Adelson even imagined that there could be a deal involving Luka—there was Jimmy. Good lord, was there Jimmy. There was Jimmy staging a month-long one-man palace revolt that he surely could not win against septuagenarian strongman Pat Riley, which played out through a series of suspensions and recriminations long past the point of caring. But credit where due: Butler’s monomaniacal persistence in the face of the oddest NBA trade deadline in memory finally got him both the escape route and the raise that he wanted, even if the team he went to is actually further behind in the standings than the one he left.
Think of it. Jimmy leaves Heat Culture for Warriors Culture. You can almost hear the whiplash from here. Although you can probably also hear some sighs. It’s rude.
In many ways, both the deal that sent Doncic to the Lakers and the one that sent Butler to the Warriors have the same central theme—teams that became disaffected from their best player and/or vice versa accepting the medicine of dynamite rather than conciliation. Doncic is now free of the Mavericks and they of him, with all the snide fat-and-dissolute innuendo that came with it. Butler and his habitually mercurial nature leaves Miami to become part of the most stolid marquee team this side of the Belichick-Brady New England Patriots.
But unlike the Doncic deal, which essentially gave the Lakers a future beyond the LeBron James Family Band and may well have rendered the Mavericks unimportant for the foreseeable future, the Butler deal is a whirlwind that fundamentally changes both Miami and Golden State, reinforces Utah's historical role as The Team To Call When You're Trying To Trade With Someone Else, involves Detroit in a way that suggests the Pistons are finally ready to be involved in trades, and cements Phoenix's new position as the Team That Only Hears No. A lot of oddly defined significance, all told, for a deal that involved four teams running out of normal ways to insert themselves into conceivable playoff scenarios. The Warriors, who are among the league's oldest teams, decided to get better by getting older. That's how strange this is.
Most of the attention here will go toward Butler, who expected a new contract from Miami, didn't get it, and subsequently staged a series of impromptu wildcat strikes to demonstrate that he is still capable of the middle-fingered intractability that got him out of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. He also said at one point that he also didn't want to go to San Francisco, but the idea of being trapped in a loveless marriage and subsequent separation made him see the light—well, that and a new two-year deal worth $111 million to make him pretend to love North Beach. There is a lot of good coffee there. That part, at least, might work out.
But with all due respect to the departed Warriors—Andrew Wiggins, who became Florida-bound collateral damage; Kyle Anderson, a fringe player with the Warriors who might flourish in the Heat’s annoyance-intensive culture; Dennis Schroder, a valuable piece exiled to a valueless team in Utah, and Lindy Waters III, who will get a shot with a suddenly insouciant Detroit team—Butler has been given what may well be his last championship-capable team. It is one that has largely resisted fundamental change, and now takes one last big swing to show Curry it means to either steal one last title it does not currently deserve even to fantasize about or have the grace to die noisily.
Curry remains its centerpiece, stylistically, emotionally and even politically, as he has been for a decade. He is the franchise in ways that Butler always thought he might be and often insisted he should be, and as much as the concept of chippy Butler-Green practices might spark internet fantasies that involve blood on the moon, the acid test for compatibility here was, is, and will always be Curry. It is Steve Kerr's greatest gift that Curry does not seem inclined to engage in the sort of traditional empire-building that other NBA alphas are inclined to chase. That back-channel power is one of a multitude of reasons why there will be a phalanx of shimmying naptime statues of Curry outside each entrance of Chase Center and trailing down Bayfront Park to the Ferry Building.
How Butler navigates this brand new world, one in which he is required to bring only his talent and not his concomitant insistence upon culture change, and how the Warriors navigate Butler in that new state, is now the most fascinating narrative of the remainder of the season. That's saying something given that the fifth-, eighth-, ninth-, 10th-, 11th- and 12th-place teams in the Western Conference (including Phoenix, which seems to have gotten snake-eyed at the deadline) were so willing to radically renovate themselves in the past week. If that doesn't suggest a basic lack of industry-wide faith in the Oklahoma City Thunder's championship pedigree, nothing does.
More than all that, though, it means that a remarkable number of teams are willing to jettison everything they believed in or professed to plan for in exchange for a chance at a title that seems guaranteed for nobody; if nothing else, this may help with Adam Silver's nightmare scenario of a Cleveland-Memphis Finals. That's the essential beauty of a league whose oldest citizens—James, Curry, Butler, Durant—are not yet ready to cede today to tomorrow, and whose current teams are banking desperately on their collective refusal to age out gracefully. They might all be delusional, of course. But we’re all in that delusion with them, until some upstart TBD (hello, Wemby) wakes everyone up and detonates 15 years of league history.
