Not long before the Feb. 6 trade deadline, the Golden State Warriors agreed to make a blockbuster trade for star forward Jimmy Butler.
On Feb. 5, the news leaked. Interestingly, the Warriors were on the road for a game against the Utah Jazz when news of the trade started to surface. According to Andscape’s Marc J. Spears, two longtime pillars of the team, guard Stephen Curry and defensive ace Draymond Green, texted Butler at halftime of the Jazz contest.
“The Butler trade had the oddity of being agreed to on Feb. 5 while the Warriors were on the road to play the Jazz,” Spears wrote. “Both Curry and fellow Warriors star Draymond Green texted Butler at halftime to welcome him. Butler responded by telling Curry and Green to win the game, which the Warriors lost 131-128, and worry about him afterwards. But the sentiment of those texts certainly meant a lot to Butler.”
Green implied that he had an inkling the Warriors would add a player of Butler’s caliber.
“Soon as we found out about the trade, we were getting ready for a game, but also just wanting him to know like, ‘Yo, we are looking forward to you getting here,'” Green said. “It’s something that everyone’s kind of been anticipating, not necessarily that we ever knew it would be Jimmy Butler [coming]. But we knew it would be somebody of that magnitude and that we were going after. And so [it was] just kind of letting him know the excitement that we’re all looking forward to him joining.”
While the Warriors have yet to prove what they can accomplish in the playoffs with Butler in the fold, the trade has aged like fine wine for the team to this point. Golden State has won all but one of the 13 games Butler has played in, with that one loss coming against the Dallas Mavericks on Feb. 12. Additionally, Golden State is on a five-game winning streak at the moment.
The Warriors are hoping that the addition of Butler will prove to be just what the team needs to advance deep into the 2025 NBA Playoffs, assuming Golden State qualifies. The Warriors sit as the No. 6 seed in the Western Conference right now.
Butler might not have an NBA championship under his belt yet, but he’s been one of the top playoff performers of his generation. He has a penchant for raising his level of play when the games start to matter more, and he led the Miami Heat to a pair of appearances in the NBA Finals earlier on this decade.
In the 2023 NBA Playoffs, Butler helped a No. 8-seeded Heat team reach the championship series. That iteration of the Heat became just the second No. 8 seed in the history of the NBA to reach the NBA Finals.
Since the Warriors might not end up with a very desirable seed in this year’s playoffs, Butler may get a chance to pull off something similar to his 2023 heroics.
