WE KNEW BUTLER WAS A CHARACTER — NOW, BEHOLD HIS BADASS CHARACTER
He won’t suffer fools in his maniacal quest to win an NBA championship — certainly not Grant Williams — and his postseason takeover with the overachieving Miami Heat is elevating his legend
When two crazed men are screaming at each other — grill to grill, forehead to forehead, nose to nose, spittle burst to spittle burst — you always bet on the one with rage in his eyes and choppers poised to attack. That would be Jimmy Butler, who is worshipped in his profession as a “dawwgg” and surely will identify as canine in his next life. What we all want to know today is this: Why would anyone antagonize the dawwgg on the rare occasion when he and his team are asleep?
There was no rational reason for Grant Williams to do anything but keep playing basketball, in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals, after he drilled a three-pointer almost midway through the fourth quarter. His boomer gave the Boston Celtics a nine-point lead, at home in a raucous TD Garden, and without any senseless interruptions, they would pack their momentum for a Miami business trip that could springboard them to another NBA Finals.
Until, seconds later, the senseless interruption happened. Williams somehow felt bold enough to engage Butler in frothy words as they ran downcourt. Right then and there, a reel of powerhouse content was created for the eventual makers of what only can be called the “Jimmy Frickin’ Butler” documentary. The nickname was coined after his three-point winner in Game 1 — courtesy of TNT play-by-play barker Kevin Harlan, a generally well-behaved Midwesterner — and it works much better than “Playoff Jimmy” or “Jimmy Buckets” or “The Butler” or “Himmy Butler” or any other stab. Provoked by a foolish opponent, Jimmy Frickin’ Butler immediately smiled and slipped into killer mode, hitting a shot and drawing a foul from Williams. Naturally, Butler said something back.
What came next may have propelled the Miami Heat, an eighth seed that almost lost the play-in game last month, to a championship. The combatants turned into pitbulls, one headbutt from a melee, but having already won the psychological war, Butler was too savvy to carry on. He answered as he often does, by leading his inspired team on a 24-9 run, contributing nine points and appropriate snarls and smirks. The Heat now have a 2-0 series lead, positioned to clinch at home. And Jimmy Frickin’ Butler has become the leading character of a cinematic NBA postseason, his on-court brilliance — offense, defense, aura — matched only by Denver’s Nikola Jokic and, of late, Jamal Murray. As a fervent showman, Butler is the most compelling figure in sports at the moment, still carrying a chip from a journey that might be fake news if it wasn’t real. His mother kicked him out of the house at 13, forcing him to live with a surrogate family on the outskirts of Houston. Ignored by colleges, he hopscotched from a Texas community college to Marquette to the league. His pro years haven’t been painless, either, with Chicago and Minnesota growing tired of what they deemed an overly demanding and distracting act, and Philadelphia chose not to resign him four years ago. None of those teams were better in the end for the parting of ways, including the 76ers, who keep failing and firing coaches.
Yet here is Butler, refined but hardly tamed at 33, six victories from an improbable title that would forge a unique place in sports lore, as a back-alley baller whose presence breathes oxygen into a wonder team filled with Erik Spoelstra’s glorious undrafted players. Ever see a star who easily can be overlooked in the regular season, only to routinely morph into a Jordanesque force in May and June? Hence, the Playoff Jimmy tag — and an argument that the MVP trophy given to Joel Embiid be constructed with tin. At some point, Butler will realize his legacy has outgrown the chip while placing him very close to a Hall of Fame induction ceremony. For now, he can keep wearing his self-perpetuated disrespect. It’s too fun watching him knock out the doubters and talkers who remain, starting with poor Grant Williams, who brought out the Frickin’ in Jimmy.
“Yes, it did. That’s just competition at its finest. He hit a big shot. Started talking to me; I like that. I’m all for that,” said Butler, thrilled that his young opponent bit the bait. “It makes me key in a lot more. It pushes that will that I have to win a lot more. It makes me smile. It does. When people talk to me, I’m like, ‘OK, I know I’m a decent player, if you want to talk to me out of everybody that you can talk to.’ But it’s just competition. I do respect him, though. He’s a big part of what they try to do. He switches. He can shoot the ball. I just don’t know if I’m the best person to talk to.”
A would-be antagonist is better off talking to Godzilla. Once his teammates saw the confrontation, they knew the chance to come back was legitimized. “I knew it was going to be good for us," guard Caleb Martin said. "Knowing Jimmy, at that point in the game, you get him going, we'll take Mad Jimmy any time. I knew. You could kind of see it in his eyes that he was ready to go after that.”
In an odd acknowledgement, as a reserve on a more talented team with championship expectations, Williams said he was trying to out-Jimmy Jimmy and motivate his own team. The presence of stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown should be enough, but the Celtics have chemistry and coaching issues, making their outraged fans wonder if Ime Udoka’s dismissal was too harsh — why not a stiff suspension after the coach’s office affair? — and that the follies of his mismatched successor, Joe Mazzulla, will lead to doom? For Williams to go off, without grasping the consequences, only underscores how the Celtics have been freaked by Butler and the Heat.
“I think he said something and I just responded,” Williams said. “I’m a competitor, and I'm gonna battle. He got the best of me tonight, and at the end of the day, it's out of respect, because I'm not gonna run away from it. My mom always taught me, and my dad as well, you get your ass kicked and you don't come back home until you come battle again. You either come back before you die or you come back and get a win, and I'm not willing to die in this finals. I'm ready to f—ing get a win.”
Does he know, though, that basketball precincts beyond New England were laughing at him? Why poke the bear when it didn’t work well for Dillon Brooks, without a job in Memphis after his dopey cheap shots and verbal darts at LeBron James in the Western Conference playoffs? “No matter if I lit him up tonight or not, he is going to do that," Williams rationalized. “For me, it's a matter of understanding, yeah, sure, you did ‘poke a bear.’ And how are you going to respond? Because for me, he made some tough shots. It's a battle. And I am going to keep battling. He’s going to have to make every single tough shot the rest of the series. And I’m not going to turn and look otherwise because I respect him as a motherf—ing player.”
It took much too long, but Butler finally found a home in South Florida, where Pat Riley saw passion and leadership when other teams saw a pain in the ass. Thus, the famed Heat Culture was reborn. Riley and Spoelstra have let Jimmy be Jimmy, and finally, after a Finals loss to James and the Lakers seen by a smallish pandemic audience in 2020, multiple millions are getting a whiff of the full Butler experience now. People have heard that he’s a free spirit like few others, from his brief dreadlocks look and yoga obsession to the pickup truck that blasts country music. Don’t forget the coffee company he started in his hotel room inside the Orlando Bubble, where he charged his teammates $20 a cup. As a character, he’s one of one.
Now, they’re seeing his character.
“Look, I love that gnarly version of Jimmy, but you get that regardless,” said Spoelstra, whose melding of Butler with Bam Adebayo and a talent hodgepodge is the stuff of legends. “I just think people now are paying a lot more attention to him now that we've won some games in the postseason the last few years. Jimmy is just a real competitor.”
You think? He has been telling people since the Heat started 2-5 that they’d win a championship this season. The other day, he announced, “This year is our year.” He loves peppering the media with reminders that he’s never picked to win a championship. “The best part about it is, we still don’t care what none of y’all think, honestly speaking,” Butler said. “We don’t care if you pick us to win. We never have. We never will. We know the group of guys we have in this locker room. We know that Coach Spo puts so much confidence and belief in each and every one of us. Coach Pat as well. Our circle is small, but the circle has got so much love for one another. We pump constant confidence into everybody. We go out there and we hoop and we play basketball the right way, knowing that we’ve always got a chance.”
What’s funny is, the TNT cast of “Inside the NBA” never picks Butler to win, either. But when he was greeted with a handshake the other day by host Ernie Johnson, who said how much fun it is to watch him play, Jimmy Frickin’ Butler melted like a schoolboy.
“I spoke to a legend today, y’all saw that?” he said. “He knows who I am.”
A basketball nation already knows him well. Soon enough, so will the world, from the inferno in his eyes to the enamel on his teeth. Or are they fangs?
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.