NBA All-Star Jimmy Butler sick and tired of his 'nonchalant' teammates -- report
The Minnesota Timberwolves, with Jimmy Butler joining Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns in a star-studded lineup, made the playoffs in 2018 for the first time since league MVP Kevin Garnett took the squad to the Western Conference Finals in 2004.
That playoff trip, secured by a win-or-go-home victory over the Denver Nuggets on the last day of the season, might prove to be the worst thing to happen to the Wolves franchise in its history.
Butler, according to a new report in the Chicago Sun-Times, has “no intention” of signing a contract extension with Minnesota.
He reportedly is “all but fed up with the nonchalant attitude of his younger teammates,” namely Wiggins and Towns.
Which is where the unfortunate playoff appearance comes in.
Had Minnesota lost to Denver, wholesale changes would have been easier to make. They could fire coach Tom Thibodeau. They could ship Wiggins, who was one of the worst players in the league by advanced stats (among players with at least 2,500 minutes played in 2017-18, only three had a negative value over replacement player: Wiggins, Harrison Barnes and Carmelo Anthony), out of town. They could bring in a coach who could implement a system that takes advantage of Minnesota’s talent rather than trying to shoehorn them into a system that didn’t work.
Speaking of Wiggins, for a guy who was one of the worst players in the league, he was third in the league in minutes played in 2018 after leading the league in that stat in 2017.
And above all, Thibodeau is renowned for his prowess as a defensive coach, but Minnesota had the fourth-worst defensive rating in the NBA last season, and a team with young horses desperate to run the floor played at the league’s seventh-slowest pace.
Instead, they’re acting like everything’s great, and Butler, who knows what professionalism looks like from having played on a 2012 Bulls team that was the favorite to win the title until Derrick Rose got hurt, knows that whatever they’ve got in Minnesota ain’t it.
Butler reportedly wants to join forces with Kyrie Irving. The All-Star is evidently on the outs with the Boston Celtics, who might not do quite as much to keep him with the emergence of Terry Rozier at point guard during the playoffs this past season.
Butler has a player option in 2019 that it is all but assured he will opt out of, which in turn means Minnesota is now on the clock to find a trade destination for him in a league that knows the Wolves have zero leverage; ask the Spurs and Kawhi Leonard how that tends to work out in terms of getting value back.
And it’s not like the mainstream NBA media understand just how bad Wiggins is; his offensive counting stats — 17.7 points per game and the highlight-show 40 he dropped on the Clippers in January — tend to bamboozle the Charles Barkley types who fail to recognize things like a 13 player efficiency rating (league average is 15), .034 win shares per 48 minutes (the average starter on a 47-win team should post .115), and minus-0.4 value over replacement player (a good player in the G-League should come to the NBA and post a 0.0, as Quinn Cook did for the Warriors in 2018).
Butler understands that. He might not quote advanced stats like he’s Zach Lowe, but he knows when a teammate isn’t putting up a professional performance like the ones Rose and Joakim Noah put up during those Chicago glory days.
NBA players recognize when their teammates aren’t playing defense, and Wiggins and Towns are two of the worst defenders in the league at their respective positions.
So Minnesota made the playoffs. They therefore couldn’t clean house because fans would see it as fixing what isn’t broken.
And now Jimmy Butler is as good as gone.
It may be 2032 before the Wolves make the playoffs again.
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