bingewatches

The Miami Heat rolled the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night in San Francisco despite being without Jimmy Butler, as he is serving a 7-game suspension from the team for conduct detrimental to the team after he issued a trade request. It has been brewing for about a month, but hit a boiling point over the last week when Butler looked disinterested on the court and claimed he had lost his “joy” and couldn’t get it back in Miami.

It started with rumors of the Heat being willing to listen to offers on Butler in mid-December, followed by a Christmas report that Butler wanted a trade, then a Pat Riley statement insisting they wouldn’t trade him, a couple games of Butler playing poorly, and finally the official trade request that the Heat responded to with a suspension. It’s all been very messy, which comes as little surprise given the two characters at the center of the drama. Butler and Riley both have quite a history of this sort of standoff, and both are used to winning it and aren’t afraid to get uncomfortable to do so.

On Tuesday night, the Inside the NBA crew ran the highlights of Miami’s win over Golden State, featuring Chuck trying to crack some jokes on the Warriors and Heat, and eventually led to a lengthy discussion (~5:30 mark of the above video) of the entire situation. Barkley thinks Butler is handling all of this poorly and took issue with the idea that aging stars need to be paid at a max level when they’re past their prime. Kenny partially agreed with Chuck and tried to explain why he felt Butler was approaching this the wrong way, while Shaq was far more understanding of Butler’s position — which is perhaps not surprising as he once had a similar standoff with Riley in Miami.

While there was a little bit of the Shaq-Chuck shouting that tends to happen in these situations (and Ernie reprimanding Chuck for swearing on TV), it was more an interesting conversation between the three former players that illustrates how all of this happens in a bit of a gray area. Barkley has long voiced his opinion that players should be more grateful for the money they make to play basketball, and can’t figure out why any team would want to trade for Butler without a guarantee he’ll stay around beyond this season. That is also something Butler and is camp are banking on, as they’ve apparently issued warnings to the Grizzlies and others that they shouldn’t trade for the star, as he continues to push his way to one of his preferred destinations (Phoenix or Golden State) despite initially indicating he’d take a trade anywhere.

Shaq is far more on the side of guys maximizing their worth and has fewer issues with a guy leveraging whatever he can to make that happen. Kenny falls somewhere in the middle, but thinks there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about this kind of situation and believes Butler falls into that latter category. We are still a month away from the trade deadline, which means there’s plenty of time for this saga to get even stranger, and it’s likely not the last time this entire situation is up for discussion.