VDT wrote:I didnt say he is a bad player, but you have to have a more in depth look than that imo. Chicago was tanking after Butler so they were going to be worse. In Minnesota they had Wiggins and young Lavine as their perimeter options, giving the ball to Butler was obviously going to improve them a lot. When he was here, the only positive thing was the unexpectedly close series with the Raptors (and the fact that the Raptors went on to win the title, again unexpectedly). The regular season was almost as bad as this year.
Miami was also the 5th seed in the regular season. The reason they are in the finals is not because of the team talent but because of the system the have, the style of basketball they play and the fact that they are getting significant production form Dragic (whom they wanted to gift to Dallas) and their young players. Butler is being passive in the first three quarters and tries to carry them in the last with varying degrees of success.
But just watching the games one can see that Butler has a hard time creating quality shots and relies on hustle plays and drawing fouls. If he played on a team that would require him to carry more of a scoring load he would be more exposed and receive more criticism. People are also, for whatever reason, more lenient with him. If Lebron or Giannis or even Paul George scored 14 point in a win, people would say that their teammates carried them. In Butler's case they try to find whatever good plays he made during the game and focus on them.
This is just a weird conversation, Butler goes to work offensively during the hardest time of the game, the 4th quarter, and more importantly the last few minutes of a close game when the other team IS trying to slow him down as much as possible but you don't think he couldn't put up a few more shots during the game if he really felt he needed to average 25-30 points? Like I've mentioned, when the Miami press was questioning his scoring ability he put up a 30 point half THIS season. He's put up a 40 point half when he was at Chicago(2 pts 1st half, 40 in the 2nd) but he doesn't care about scoring unless the team needs it, like the end of gams, he cares about winning and it's a hell of a lot easy to win if his teammates are in the flow of the game and contributing like they can. He "could" force a few more shots per game(say 3 more per half) and average mid 20s to the high 20s in scoring and to you that would change how good he is? It wouldn't for me.
This is one of the reason I use Dean Olver's ORTG and DRTG to gage how good a player is in their role(core piece, roleplayer, bench) and Butler year after year has one of the highest numbers in the league for a core player. LeBron use to be a +20 in his 20s (ORTG-DRTG) and for the last few years he's been hoving around +10, Butler is still in that +15 range, no he's never been as good as LeBron(only 1-3 players have been in the history of the NBA) but he's not been all that far off for his impact as a player on his teams.
On Chicago, they had a horrible roster that last year with Butler, Rondo got benched and only started a handful of games, he had the shell of D.Wade there(they overpaid since he was a Chicago kid, this was right after they traded Rose), R.Lopez and T.Gibson was their front line that couldn't score, Mirotic was out a lot of that season and Paul Zipser started at SF most of those games(probably don't know much about Paul Zipser, that's the point). The way Chicago went into rebuilding mode was to trade Butler because he carried that franchise into the playoffs. That year D.Wade was released and couldn't even stick with Cleveland for depth as a minimum vet. Chicago's just a horrible franchise who only cared about the bottom dollar, hopefully, ownership changes or gets smarter there(getting rid of Gar was a good start).
Chicago's been a #$)(%#$ organization for 25+ years, hell even with Jordan there it was hard to get management to spend money, they've hired only ONE head coach with any experience as an NBA head coach those 25+ years(S.Skiles). Some owners are just detrimental to their franchise(Chicago, Minnesota, Phoenix) and that's why they're almost always bad and then there are some owners who just get it(Miami, Lakers, Dallas, Boston, SA, Portland) where most of them let their people actually guide the franchise.
