Hoops Tonight - Jimmy Butler to Warriors Reaction: Steph Curry & Golden State ready for playoff run?

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guys are having a great week. Well, the Golden State Warriors finally got a secondary star for Steph Curry as Jimmy Butler has been traded from the Miami Heat to the Bay. We're gonna be breaking down that deal from the perspective of both teams. I'm also working on a bigger trade deadline reaction that I planned on doing tonight, but I'm actually pushing till tomorrow morning. We want to talk Fox to the Spurs, Levine to the Bulls, I

want to talk Kuzma to the Bucks. I have more thoughts on Luca to the Lakers and just whether or not they should feel some more urgency in the short term. I'm going to get into all of that in tomorrow morning's episode. Tonight just hitting Jimmy to the Warriors. You guys at the joke before we get started. Subscribe to the Hoops Tonight YouTube channels you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at underscore JSNLT

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some other moving parts. It looks like Dennis Schroeder is getting rerouted to the Jazz, Lindy Waters is getting rerouted to the Pistons. I think not sure where Kyle Anderson is going. It looks like he might stay with the Heat. But the gist of it is Wiggins in a protected first round pick to the Heat, Jimmy Butler to the Golden State Warriors. The Warriors finally did it. They finally brought in a legit secondary star to play alongside Steph Curry.

There's been this weird energy surrounding the Warriors all year one that I've disagreed with and then I've pushed back with a pushback against a lot on the show, which is that they're just a bad team. And I've watched a lot of bad NBA teams, and to me, the Warriors aren't one of them. They're well coached, they play super hard, They're led by a top fifteen player in the league. They have top ten defense. They're super deep

with role player talent. I was looking at this earlier with the recent play of Gie Santos and quintin post. I've counted fifteen different players this year that have played quality minutes for the Warriors at various times during the year. You can actually push that up to sixteen if you want to count the Anthony Melton.

But there's a through line, there's a consistency in that story in all but one of those wins against Boston, Houston, Memphis, and Oklahoma City, and all but one of them they scored at least one hundred and fifteen points. They can beat anybody, but they have to score the basketball. In fact,

here's another crazy stat for you. The Warriors are twenty and sixth this year when they score at least one hundred and ten points, not one twenty, not some crazy high number, when they hit just a baseline of one hundred and ten points twenty and six. They are five and eighteen when they fail to score one hundred and ten points. When the Warriors score, they can beat anyone. But the problem is they only have one reliably good

offensive player on the entire roster. That's Steph Curry. And yes, his production has been inconsistent this year, but he still gets guarded like Steph Curry. So even on the nights where Steph isn't hitting shots and isn't putting up the numbers he normally puts up, he's still regularly impacting the game offensively in a positive way every single night because of his gravity. Because of the way he's guarded, everyone else is like a maybe they'll have it tonight kind

of guy right. Buddy Heald has shot twenty five percent or worse from three and twenty two games this year. Andrew Wiggins has hit twenty points seventeen times, but he's failed to hit fifteen points thirteen times. So there's a lot of good Wiggins, and there's a lot of games where he just doesn't bring anything offensively. And Jonathan kaminga has been just as likely to score twenty or more in a game this year as he is to score twelve or few. That's inconsistent, but that's not their fault.

We've never considered Buddy Heal to be this consistently good offensive player. We've never considered Andrew Wiggins to be a legit second option outside of that one year that him and Jordan Poole kind of combined to fill that role when they won the title. Johnathan Kaming is twenty two years old. It's completely irrational to expect those guys to be consistent producers on the offensive end of the floor. All of those guys are being asked to do something

that's frankly above their pay grade. They're role players, and role players are always going to have dramatic highs and lows when it comes to the grind of the regular season because the consistently great offensive players are not role players, they're stars. And yet on the nights, when all those guys play well and they hit their shots, they have a top ten defense and they're led by Steph Curry, So yeah, they can beat anybody. That's why I was

clamoring for this type of deal. You have this short little window here where you have Steph Curry on your team, a generational t that you might never have again. You might literally never have this guy again. Think about the way the Lukadancich trade was discussed over the course of the last few days. You want to know why MAVs fans were pissed. They're like, we might never have a player like Lukadancic ever again in the history of the franchise, and they feel like.

destined for a rebuild after this era. Anyway, you might as well go out with Steph playing in meaningful basketball games while you still get to enjoy Steph playing in meaningful basketball games. Let's start with the Jimmy Butler angle on this first, and then we'll talk about the rest of the roster. Jimmy hasn't played in the playoffs since twenty twenty three because of that flukey injury he suffered

in the playing game. If you guys remember, but he was a consensus top ten player in the league at that point, and he's kind of uniquely viewed as one of the few guys in the league that raises his level of play when he gets to the postseason. I've talked about this before. It's a very simple set of circumstances in my opinion. He's big, strong, and fast, which means as things get more intense athletically, he can thrive

in that setting. And then he's super versatile, meaning whatever the challenges that's presented him, he can kind of shape shift and fill different roles to whatever his team needs, and as a result, he just has a higher floor. He can change whatever he needs for that specific matchup, so there's less situations where his talent doesn't match up and more situations where his talent does match up to

the circumstances, and so he's able to play well. Now, he had this ugly falling out with the Miami Heat, and that's classic Jimmy. We've seen it before. But I expect him to come into Golden State in immediately locked back in as a member of the team, and just before we get into some of the fit, it's just real talent upside. He's still probably one of the top fifteen players in the league you'd want to have on your team in a playoff series. That's an automatic influx

of talent. So now let's talk about his fit with the team. He's going to have to immediately fill two roles. He's going to have to fill that Andrew Wiggins role of that primary perimeter defender, but he's also going to have to fill that Dennis Schroeder role in terms of the guy that's got to be their secondary shot creator. When Steph is on the floor and have to lead units.

When Steph is off the floor, He's going to have to be their primary perimeter defensive weapon against the wings of the Western Conference.

guarding players on the perimeter in the playoffs. I think in the regular season he'll be a slight downgrade from Andrew Wiggins, but in high leverage spots he's still one of the best defensive.

It's more just about commitment and his willingness to do that amount of work. But I think, at least in a postseason context, it's something that I think Jimmy's going to be able to live up to. I think he's just a massive upgrade over any sort of offensive weapon that this team had. Last year, he was one of the best matchup attacking players in the NBA. Of the twenty four players ran who ran at least three hundred ISOs last year, he ranked third in efficiency at one

point one to three points per possession including passes. He was over a point per possession on almost two hundred post ups. He was over fifty percent or just under fifty percent excuse me, have floaters and hooks. Very gifted passer, similar to what I was talking about earlier with Steph. Even on the Knights, when Steph isn't hitting shots, he's still creating shots with the way that he's guarded. Jimmy Butler last year had fifteen games with at least seven assists.

Andrew Wiggins has had fourteen such games in his entire career. That's how much of a playmaking upgrade Jimmy Butler is over Andrew Wiggins. It will help them offensively in every single way. It'll give him the best two man game they've had since Kevin Durant was on the team again.

Any sort of action involving Steph and Jimmy is going to present defenses with a lot of problems because the kind of guy who's quick enough and attentive enough to guard Steph's very different than the big kind of like Ford. You need to deal with a guy like Jimmy Butler. So any sort of action between the two of them, Jimmy screens for Steph. They're gonna have to put two

on the ball now, Jimmy's gonna be open. You've got a four on three being led by a very very good offensive player, better than anybody else that's on the roster at this point. Right Jimmy has the ball, Steph screens for him. They don't switch to stay with Steph. Jimmy's gonna go right downhill, rip to the basket for a dunk. If they leave Steph to put two on Jimmy, Steph's gonna be wide open poppingto the three point line.

And now, if Steph and Jimmy run a two man game and there's a switch, Jimmy Butler is the type of player that has the ability to consistently punish that switch in a way that Andrew Wiggins could not. It's a massive upgrade there. He's been a knockdown spot up shooter for a few years now, like damn near fifty percent. It'll give them a much much better chance to survive than non Steph minutes. It'll give them a bona fide playoff stud to just hang in terms of the talent

of those environments. And most importantly, it slots all the other role players into more achievable roles. As long as Steph and Jimmy are both healthy, you'll never have to watch a bench unit without a star trying and failing to score. As long as those two guys are healthy, you won't have to see that. I'm super excited to see this group in action. Also, the spot up shoot numbers that's based on catch and shoot numbers. He's been shooting about fifty percent on catch and shoot jump shots

for the last couple of years, which is crazy. And you still have depth. This is the beauty of having fifteen guys that have all played quality minutes for you.

foundation this summer. If you're if there's some other hole in the roster that appears over the course the next couple months and you want to try to round it out this summer. Now you have a stronger foundation with Steph Raymond and Jimmy as opposed to just Stephan Draymond. The Warriors are currently two and a half games out of the sixth seed. Do I think they're gonna climb to the top of the conference. No, I mean they

have a chance to get out of the plane. But like, they're not gonna be some dominant team in the Western Conference.

That makes it really hard to aggregate salaries without giving up a ton of players. They were in a tough spot. There was no perfect deal. There was nothing out there that was gonna magically turn them into some top tier contender. But you went from a team that had no shot because they didn't have the shot creation talent necessary to actually contend to now you there's a chance there. Now I can see Steph and Jimmy in a playoff series and the defense comes together. This is a top ten defense.

You can imagine a lineup with Steph next to Gary Payton, with Jimmy on the floor, Jonathan Minga and Draymond and you're like, there's actually a good amount of talent, athleticism, defensive talent, guys that can score the basketball on the floor. That's a lineup that might cause some problems for teams, Whereas we've seen too often this year, like if you just guard the Warriors, well, they probably aren't gonna make any shots and you'll probably beat them. It just gives

you an upside that wasn't there before. And I just really wanted to see Steph playing some more meaningful basketball games, and I'm really really excited that we're going to get to see that. I think this was probably the perfect outcome for the Miami Heat. Andrew Wiggins is a really high level role player. In the same way that he's like underqualified for what the Golden State Warriors needed from him, he's overqualified for what the Miami Heat need from it,

and that's a good thing. I think he's a top tier perimeter defender in this league. He's got the speed to guard guards and the size of guard wings. I'm super excited to see him in lineups next to Bam and kill el ware like that could be frightening to deal with defensively. But most importantly, you turned a malcontent who is actively trying to sabotage your season into a really high level role player that plays the same position, and you got a first round pick out of it.

Too hard not to view that as a massive win for the Miami Heat compared to the alternative. The alternative is your max contract player is just actively trying to mess up everything that you're trying to do. Now you can move on see what this group is capable of. I think there's an obvious offensive ceiling on a team that's led by Terry Rogier, Duncan Robinson, Tyler harrowbam Adebayo.

There's an obvious offensive limitation there. But now you have the actual type of top end athletic personnel on the wing to anchor your frontline and give yourself a defensive ceiling that wasn't there before, or at least wasn't there because Jimmy Butler wasn't playing. So I mean, I think if you really compare it to some of the other

deals that were getting floated around out there. I think this one actually made the most sense for them in terms of increasing their potential in the short and the long term. All right, guys, that's all I have for tonight. Again, as I said, I'm going to get much deeper into the trade deadline tomorrow. I'll get into a bunch of other storylines. As always, a sincerely appreciate you guys for rocking with me and for supporting the show. And I'll see you guys then.