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How Good is Jimmy Butler?

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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#181 » by johnnyvann840 » Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:39 am

Go Jimmy. I want a Nuggets/Heat Finals so badly. My 2nd team vs. my favorite player.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#182 » by HomoSapien » Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:42 am

johnnyvann840 wrote:Go Jimmy. I want a Nuggets/Heat Finals so badly. My 2nd team vs. my favorite player.


Obviously, I'm glad Gar is fired and Pax has taken a step back but part of me wishes they were around to answer that question from Cowley at a presser if the Heat do make the finals.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#183 » by terry » Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:46 am

shanedude wrote:Not tryna troll, thank y'all for Jimmy. We ****ing love him. What a baller :o


Well considering you got him in a trade from Philadelphia for Josh Richardson. You should probably thank them.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#184 » by AhUtopian » Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:49 am

If it is Heat vs Nuggets,may I consider it as Jimmy Butler vs McDermott

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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#185 » by PaKii94 » Wed Sep 16, 2020 2:29 am

There is a reason I haven't changed my Avi and sig since the trade
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#186 » by Susan » Wed Sep 16, 2020 2:48 am

HomoSapien wrote:Well, Buckets continues to prove that the talent evaluation on this board is broken.


Just wait for Thibs turning the Knicks around. So many people couldn't get off the GarPax toxic train.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#187 » by dice » Wed Sep 16, 2020 3:00 am

Mech Engineer wrote:
MrSparkle wrote:
Mech Engineer wrote:
They should have known better to stay away from injury prone players by that time. They were also terrible in evaluating offensive minded players always picking the bust ones.


I did find it tragically comical that after the 4-year Rose debacle, they decided to trade a healthy prime all-star for a guy with an ACL tear, drafted Zipser who had an ACL tear (or something season-ending in Germany), drafted Valentine who had bad ankles, signed Rondo who never really reached his pre-ACL level of play, signed a 35yo Wade who was clearly 50% of his young self in the finals.... and then even traded iron man Taj for Cam Payne, a guy who had been nursing a broken foot for a year.

You couldn't make it up. :lol: I guess Hinkie was regarded a master-mind at the time.


Not to forget they were ready to trade Jimmy just for Dunn the previous year thinking he is the bigger version of Rose.

nobody thought anything like that. c'mon. minnesota obviously would have done that deal. and even if they wouldn't, if the bulls thought that highly of dunn they would've traded the entire team for him. or, more accurately, traded up to draft him
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#188 » by dice » Wed Sep 16, 2020 3:02 am

johnnyvann840 wrote:Go Jimmy. I want a Nuggets/Heat Finals so badly. My 2nd team vs. my favorite player.

what are your thoughts on the nugs drafting MPJ at this point?
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#189 » by chrispatrick » Wed Sep 16, 2020 3:29 am

dougthonus wrote:
chrispatrick wrote:Oh man, nothing fires me up more than a "it was a right move at the time". (Which, to be fair, seemed to be at least half of this board's thinking).


:dontknow:

All moves operate on a continuum of unknown variables. People tend to look at the results and then pretend that they knew this would happen all along, but those same people cannot predict all the results from today to 2 years from today. They just predicted this one thing.

Take any event, and there is someone who will have predicted it, but that same person can't be relied on to predict the next thing or all things. I state this, just so we can drop the notion that "I called this, so of course I'm right", because no one, not me, not you, not anyone else, is predicting things at such a rate that they should take up this stance.

If you then remove that, and operate on the idea of what Butler's skillset was and what his contract was, and those of the players we got back and the position of the franchise you're left with something like this:

1: Butler looked like a low rung all-star type guy. Definitely highly questionable whether he could be a franchise guy. Had clashes with a lot of people as well. He was on a sweetheart deal with two years left due to the cap change and would be looking for a 5/200M supermax if he stays.

2: LaVine / Dunn were two young players on rookie deals. Dunn was just drafted 5th in the previous draft and had a rough developmental year, but there was reason to believe he still had good upside. LaVine was a guy with obvious star potential that just needed to get healthy. #7 pick in the draft probably wasn't expected to yield all that much, low end starter type guy was probably a reasonable guess what you'd get out of it. #16 was probably projected as a low end rotation guy.

3: The Bulls context is they really have nothing around them and no immediate way to make the team better. They've won 40ish games for a few years now and fans are sick of the treadmill, they need to make a big leap forward and probably can't do so around Jimmy in the following year and maybe or maybe not the year after that. There is a threat he will leave or a threat you will have to pay him 40M to stay, and again, at that point he looks like a low run all-star not worth 40M.

What happens after the trade:
1: Jimmy's stock as an individual continues to rise.
2: Dunn's stock after an initial boost goes to zero.
3: Zach's stock probably ends up a bit higher than it was.
4: Lauri ends up about where you'd expect (after an initial boost where he looks like a big win is now about where you'd think).

After a year, this trade still looks good for the Bulls, and probably really bad for the Wolves, whom now have Butler demanding out and get even less for him than they gave up which is also a sign that Butler's value has decreased and if the Bulls waited to trade later they would have ended up with even less.

Butler leaves the team that trades for him in a S&T, and so the Bulls may have ended up in the same boat had they kept Butler and had to trade him, which would have also still gotten them less than they got at the time they actually traded him. Alternatively, they may have Butler on a 40M per year contract now, and they'd probably still have a tough time figuring out how to win.

Butler is on his 3rd team since the Bulls, and only the 3rd team has found a way to make it really work so far, and that team wasn't permitted to sign him to the supermax so didn't have our downside.

With all that said, the question then becomes what would the Bulls be had they kept Butler instead of trading him? I think history shows this:
1: The Bulls got better value when they traded him than Minnesota or Philly did when they traded him, so the opportunity to trade him for more later did not appear to exist. Ie, the Bulls got as much value in a trade as they could have expected to get.

2: The Bulls still didn't have a path forward that looks like it would have led to more than the 40ish win performance they had with Butler and this wasn't a path fans wanted to go down.

The Bulls mistake IMO was not in trading Butler, but in not aggressively tanking when they did trade him and not aggressively trying to get more picks to rebuild with. We didn't even mean to tank for a single year, but we ended up tanking for two years. When you decided to go with this rebuild, you should have committed hard to it instead of trying to immediately rebuild into an average team. If you wanted the average team you could have just stuck with Butler.

In the end, with 2017 information, I would still make that trade, but I would have had drastically different follow up actions philosophically. I would have committed to being bad and ended up with a top 5 pick in 2018 (by being one of the worst 2 teams) and would have likely had something similar in 2019 (unless I drafted Doncic in 2018 whom would have single handedly stopped that from happening).


I disagree with what we should have known at the time and equating the analysis to just a "prediction" seems to ignore all of the evidence of who these players were at the time. This was predicted by many in the same fashion that we can predict the sun will go up tomorrow, not something like "the Cubs or Sox will win the World Series!".

We've seen the sun rise over and over again. We've seen Butler be really good over and over again pre and post-trade. We've seen LaVine contribute little outside of scoring over and over again pre and post-trade.

The only variable here that was really left up to prediction and went against the Bulls was that Lauri wasn't a little better and the draft lottery luck sucked, though even that was an area where management failed chances by only partially embracing the tank. All other evidence of what this trade has turned out to be was available at the time and need not have been "predicted."

While I no doubt take satisfaction in Butler's success, here's what we knew at the time:

1.) Butler was and is a top 10-15 guy. Nearly all advanced metrics had him on the fringe of the top 10 at the time, but people liked to exclude him and put towards 15 because he didn't have the athletic profile or star power of other guys on that list. I don't know that I'd move Butler up or down from where he was at the time, it's just easier to look good when your team is not gearing up for the playoffs by acquiring Cameron Payne.

2.) Many people decided that a top 10-15 guy wasn't good enough to lead a team. As if a player of Butler's caliber automatically puts you in NBA purgatory. We decided this, despite never once attempting to build any team around him. All of that 3-point shooting and defense you want to put around a good player? Nope, we weren't acquiring these types of players. Butler should have been viewed as one of the easier players in that range to build around or with because of his ability to impact the game off the ball. Striking out over and over again in acquiring complimentary pieces is no excuse for giving up the one good thing you have.

3.) (Some) people kept spouting fear of paying Butler a $40M contract. Nevermind that our team payroll is currently $117M and collectively cannot impact as many games as Butler individually was capable of. We all know max contracts distort NBA economics and inflate mediocre players' contracts such that stars like Butler are underpaid while role players like, say, anyone on the Bulls making $8M or more a year, are overpaid. The one argument one could make here is I suppose you could have feared Butler wouldn't maintain his play, but I at least hope we're on the same page in that Butler was worth more than $40M at the time and don't think we had significant reason to fear a coming drop-off in play.

4.) A huge, huge problem in starting re-building with LaVine, Lauri, and Dunn, is none of these guys should have been viewed as having a realistic chance to be good enough to one day exceed a max contract. You mention LaVine having star potential and I cannot comprehend how one could have thought that. This guy's teams had been absolutely murdered on the court for (I think it was) 3 straight years while performing significantly better without him and that was prior to him tearing his knee. The deficiencies causing this have always been evident to the eye test as he will not impact the game off the ball. Pretty much any believer of advanced stats was shouting this as loud as they could from the mountaintops since 2017 so this shouldn't be viewed as a prediction. When a player's team so routinely sucks more with him than without him, that cannot be ignored.

5.) I also don't think the NBA in general was high on Dunn's upside coming out of his rookie year. This wasn't a case of a guy not playing and not knowing what you have. This was a guy who had play FOUR years of college and then didn't show much his rookie year despite getting the opportunity to do so.

6.) Agree it was a big loss for the Wolves, but that had nothing to do with us. Butler wanted to be here.

7.) Fans should have been sick of winning 40-ish games a year is no reason to trade the guy who prevented you from winning 20-25ish games a year. Again, at no point did we build around Butler with a quality supporting cast to see what Butler could do with one.

8.) Again, this isn't a prediction, but the Bulls roster has nearly no value today. In that regard, I don't know how we made out any better than the Sixers or Wolves. We don't really have anyone who is much better than their contract and I'm not sure that we should care whether Lauri or Dunn stay or go and I don't know why anyone would care if LaVine stays or goes. Carter and White might be in that group of guys who are better than their contracts for now, but they're complimentary players with nobody worth complimenting on the roster. The #4 pick, our reward for another bad season, is the Bulls most valuable asset.

9.) Choosing an inept coach like Hoiberg over Butler stung.

I viewed this trade as horrific enough at the time that it was incredibly impactful to my Bulls fandom and I no longer watch the Bulls much. Know that I was never previously a fair-weather fan before this and watched at least 90% of games every season from 1998-1999 to 2016-2017. I had no problem re-building before because I could buy into the hope of potential stardom in our young guys in that era starting with Brand/Artest through the Three Cs. I think we already knew a lot about LaVine and Dunn and there was too much evidence that they had serious flaws in their games to ever generate that hope for them.

I hope the Bulls become great again for all of the awesome and incredibly intelligent and fun to read posters on this board like yourself (I absolutely love your posts!), but this was meaningfully bad enough moment in Bulls history to me that it shouldn't be lumped in as another prediction for me. I didn't claim to know whether the Brand/Chandler trade would work out. I didn't claim to know whether the Artest/Miller/Jalen trade would work out. I didn't claim to know whether the LaMarcus/Tyrus trade would work out. This one was simply in a different category for me.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#190 » by johnnyvann840 » Wed Sep 16, 2020 3:50 am

dice wrote:
johnnyvann840 wrote:Go Jimmy. I want a Nuggets/Heat Finals so badly. My 2nd team vs. my favorite player.

what are your thoughts on the nugs drafting MPJ at this point?


I'm glad they did. He looks really good. I'm still skeptical that his back is going to hold up, but he's a much better player than I thought he could ever be. He's still a defensive liability and Malone has had to keep him out of some key moments, but that's to be expected at his age and level of experience. He wasn't able to really contribute tonight in a game 7. He's young, though, and will get better and he was a great get for the Nugs that late.

I give the kid a ton of credit for coming back from everything he's been through and proving me wrong so far about his talent level. Hopefully, he can stay healthy and really be something.

Also, I even said on draft day that I am a Denver fan and I hoped he could get healthy and play eventually. I also said that they were an organization that was in a position to be able to have the patience necessary. I did think he was a waste of a lotto pick and I was very wrong.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#191 » by Jimako10 » Wed Sep 16, 2020 4:24 am

We didn't even attempt to obtain a 1st round pick for him, while the Clippers gave 5 for Paul George.

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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#192 » by bad knees » Wed Sep 16, 2020 4:36 am

chrispatrick wrote:
dougthonus wrote:
chrispatrick wrote:Oh man, nothing fires me up more than a "it was a right move at the time". (Which, to be fair, seemed to be at least half of this board's thinking).


:dontknow:

All moves operate on a continuum of unknown variables. People tend to look at the results and then pretend that they knew this would happen all along, but those same people cannot predict all the results from today to 2 years from today. They just predicted this one thing.

Take any event, and there is someone who will have predicted it, but that same person can't be relied on to predict the next thing or all things. I state this, just so we can drop the notion that "I called this, so of course I'm right", because no one, not me, not you, not anyone else, is predicting things at such a rate that they should take up this stance.

If you then remove that, and operate on the idea of what Butler's skillset was and what his contract was, and those of the players we got back and the position of the franchise you're left with something like this:

1: Butler looked like a low rung all-star type guy. Definitely highly questionable whether he could be a franchise guy. Had clashes with a lot of people as well. He was on a sweetheart deal with two years left due to the cap change and would be looking for a 5/200M supermax if he stays.

2: LaVine / Dunn were two young players on rookie deals. Dunn was just drafted 5th in the previous draft and had a rough developmental year, but there was reason to believe he still had good upside. LaVine was a guy with obvious star potential that just needed to get healthy. #7 pick in the draft probably wasn't expected to yield all that much, low end starter type guy was probably a reasonable guess what you'd get out of it. #16 was probably projected as a low end rotation guy.

3: The Bulls context is they really have nothing around them and no immediate way to make the team better. They've won 40ish games for a few years now and fans are sick of the treadmill, they need to make a big leap forward and probably can't do so around Jimmy in the following year and maybe or maybe not the year after that. There is a threat he will leave or a threat you will have to pay him 40M to stay, and again, at that point he looks like a low run all-star not worth 40M.

What happens after the trade:
1: Jimmy's stock as an individual continues to rise.
2: Dunn's stock after an initial boost goes to zero.
3: Zach's stock probably ends up a bit higher than it was.
4: Lauri ends up about where you'd expect (after an initial boost where he looks like a big win is now about where you'd think).

After a year, this trade still looks good for the Bulls, and probably really bad for the Wolves, whom now have Butler demanding out and get even less for him than they gave up which is also a sign that Butler's value has decreased and if the Bulls waited to trade later they would have ended up with even less.

Butler leaves the team that trades for him in a S&T, and so the Bulls may have ended up in the same boat had they kept Butler and had to trade him, which would have also still gotten them less than they got at the time they actually traded him. Alternatively, they may have Butler on a 40M per year contract now, and they'd probably still have a tough time figuring out how to win.

Butler is on his 3rd team since the Bulls, and only the 3rd team has found a way to make it really work so far, and that team wasn't permitted to sign him to the supermax so didn't have our downside.

With all that said, the question then becomes what would the Bulls be had they kept Butler instead of trading him? I think history shows this:
1: The Bulls got better value when they traded him than Minnesota or Philly did when they traded him, so the opportunity to trade him for more later did not appear to exist. Ie, the Bulls got as much value in a trade as they could have expected to get.

2: The Bulls still didn't have a path forward that looks like it would have led to more than the 40ish win performance they had with Butler and this wasn't a path fans wanted to go down.

The Bulls mistake IMO was not in trading Butler, but in not aggressively tanking when they did trade him and not aggressively trying to get more picks to rebuild with. We didn't even mean to tank for a single year, but we ended up tanking for two years. When you decided to go with this rebuild, you should have committed hard to it instead of trying to immediately rebuild into an average team. If you wanted the average team you could have just stuck with Butler.

In the end, with 2017 information, I would still make that trade, but I would have had drastically different follow up actions philosophically. I would have committed to being bad and ended up with a top 5 pick in 2018 (by being one of the worst 2 teams) and would have likely had something similar in 2019 (unless I drafted Doncic in 2018 whom would have single handedly stopped that from happening).


I disagree with what we should have known at the time and equating the analysis to just a "prediction" seems to ignore all of the evidence of who these players were at the time. This was predicted by many in the same fashion that we can predict the sun will go up tomorrow, not something like "the Cubs or Sox will win the World Series!".

We've seen the sun rise over and over again. We've seen Butler be really good over and over again pre and post-trade. We've seen LaVine contribute little outside of scoring over and over again pre and post-trade.

The only variable here that was really left up to prediction and went against the Bulls was that Lauri wasn't a little better and the draft lottery luck sucked, though even that was an area where management failed chances by only partially embracing the tank. All other evidence of what this trade has turned out to be was available at the time and need not have been "predicted."

While I no doubt take satisfaction in Butler's success, here's what we knew at the time:

1.) Butler was and is a top 10-15 guy. Nearly all advanced metrics had him on the fringe of the top 10 at the time, but people liked to exclude him and put towards 15 because he didn't have the athletic profile or star power of other guys on that list. I don't know that I'd move Butler up or down from where he was at the time, it's just easier to look good when your team is not gearing up for the playoffs by acquiring Cameron Payne.

2.) Many people decided that a top 10-15 guy wasn't good enough to lead a team. As if a player of Butler's caliber automatically puts you in NBA purgatory. We decided this, despite never once attempting to build any team around him. All of that 3-point shooting and defense you want to put around a good player? Nope, we weren't acquiring these types of players. Butler should have been viewed as one of the easier players in that range to build around or with because of his ability to impact the game off the ball. Striking out over and over again in acquiring complimentary pieces is no excuse for giving up the one good thing you have.

3.) (Some) people kept spouting fear of paying Butler a $40M contract. Nevermind that our team payroll is currently $117M and collectively cannot impact as many games as Butler individually was capable of. We all know max contracts distort NBA economics and inflate mediocre players' contracts such that stars like Butler are underpaid while role players like, say, anyone on the Bulls making $8M or more a year, are overpaid. The one argument one could make here is I suppose you could have feared Butler wouldn't maintain his play, but I at least hope we're on the same page in that Butler was worth more than $40M at the time and don't think we had significant reason to fear a coming drop-off in play.

4.) A huge, huge problem in starting re-building with LaVine, Lauri, and Dunn, is none of these guys should have been viewed as having a realistic chance to be good enough to one day exceed a max contract. You mention LaVine having star potential and I cannot comprehend how one could have thought that. This guy's teams had been absolutely murdered on the court for (I think it was) 3 straight years while performing significantly better without him and that was prior to him tearing his knee. The deficiencies causing this have always been evident to the eye test as he will not impact the game off the ball. Pretty much any believer of advanced stats was shouting this as loud as they could from the mountaintops since 2017 so this shouldn't be viewed as a prediction. When a player's team so routinely sucks more with him than without him, that cannot be ignored.

5.) I also don't think the NBA in general was high on Dunn's upside coming out of his rookie year. This wasn't a case of a guy not playing and not knowing what you have. This was a guy who had play FOUR years of college and then didn't show much his rookie year despite getting the opportunity to do so.

6.) Agree it was a big loss for the Wolves, but that had nothing to do with us. Butler wanted to be here.

7.) Fans should have been sick of winning 40-ish games a year is no reason to trade the guy who prevented you from winning 20-25ish games a year. Again, at no point did we build around Butler with a quality supporting cast to see what Butler could do with one.

8.) Again, this isn't a prediction, but the Bulls roster has nearly no value today. In that regard, I don't know how we made out any better than the Sixers or Wolves. We don't really have anyone who is much better than their contract and I'm not sure that we should care whether Lauri or Dunn stay or go and I don't know why anyone would care if LaVine stays or goes. Carter and White might be in that group of guys who are better than their contracts for now, but they're complimentary players with nobody worth complimenting on the roster. The #4 pick, our reward for another bad season, is the Bulls most valuable asset.

9.) Choosing an inept coach like Hoiberg over Butler stung.

I viewed this trade as horrific enough at the time that it was incredibly impactful to my Bulls fandom and I no longer watch the Bulls much. Know that I was never previously a fair-weather fan before this and watched at least 90% of games every season from 1998-1999 to 2016-2017. I had no problem re-building before because I could buy into the hope of potential stardom in our young guys in that era starting with Brand/Artest through the Three Cs. I think we already knew a lot about LaVine and Dunn and there was too much evidence that they had serious flaws in their games to ever generate that hope for them.

I hope the Bulls become great again for all of the awesome and incredibly intelligent and fun to read posters on this board like yourself (I absolutely love your posts!), but this was meaningfully bad enough moment in Bulls history to me that it shouldn't be lumped in as another prediction for me. I didn't claim to know whether the Brand/Chandler trade would work out. I didn't claim to know whether the Artest/Miller/Jalen trade would work out. I didn't claim to know whether the LaMarcus/Tyrus trade would work out. This one was simply in a different category for me.


I’ll never forget. I was on a flight home to Chicago the night that the Bulls traded Jimmy. Trying to monitor the draft on sketchy AA WiFi. I was literally sick to my stomach when they announced that the trade went down.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#193 » by TeamMan » Wed Sep 16, 2020 7:29 am

I've followed this thread with reduced passion because this scenario (watching an ex Bulls doing well on a different team) is old for me.

It will show my age, but the 1st time I felt the way that many posters in this thread feel was when the Bulls traded Clifford Ray to the Warriors, and the next year the Warriors won the NBA title.

And to make it even worse, it was the Warriors that eliminated the Bulls from the playoffs that same year in the Western Conference Finals. That just tore my hear out.

Since then, the closest that I've come to the same feeling, was watching Tyson Chandler win his ring with the Mavs.

But there have been may others that had a lot more success in their careers after leaving the Bulls. It has happened periodically during the Bulls long history.

Jimmy is just the latest.

But in all fairness, most teams have at least some players that have greater success with others teams after leaving them. There are probably a lot of fans for the T-Wolves that wish they'd kept LaVine.

However, what bothers me most, is that after the MJ/Pip dynasty years, the Bulls have been perpetually stuck on this treadmill.

But hopefully, the firing of Gar/Pax signals that ownership has finally decided to change the way that they do business. Because that is where it all starts, with ownership.

We will just have to wait and see.

But I have to be honest (because it has been so long).

In any case, I won't be surprised if the cycle continues.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#194 » by troza » Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:25 am

Funny thing... we traded Butler on the year the Cavs started to break down (traded Irving).

With the East the way it is, we could have a chance to go to the finals with the right team around him. I doubt we would be able to do it because we never commited 100% with one plan... and his last year here where we would rebuild and then changed to Wade + Rondo plan... that shows we had no plan.

We still haven't gone full tank mode neither full build around a guy mode.

Butler was very good for us. We weren't for Butler. It is good to see him on a good team.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#195 » by dougthonus » Wed Sep 16, 2020 11:10 am

chrispatrick wrote:We've seen the sun rise over and over again. We've seen Butler be really good over and over again pre and post-trade. We've seen LaVine contribute little outside of scoring over and over again pre and post-trade.


LaVine had played 2.5 year prior to the trade, and had shown absolutely massive improvement. He has also shown massive improvement since the trade. Dunn had played one year in the league and was a previous #5 pick. To write both of these things off is simply a using the power of hindsight. They were both guys whom had obvious potential.

1.) Butler was and is a top 10-15 guy. Nearly all advanced metrics had him on the fringe of the top 10 at the time, but people liked to exclude him and put towards 15 because he didn't have the athletic profile or star power of other guys on that list. I don't know that I'd move Butler up or down from where he was at the time, it's just easier to look good when your team is not gearing up for the playoffs by acquiring Cameron Payne.


It's worth noting his last Bulls season was his best statistical year, but I agree he was a top 10-15 guy. This year, any metric probably puts him at best as a top 15 guy and not better.

2.) Many people decided that a top 10-15 guy wasn't good enough to lead a team. As if a player of Butler's caliber automatically puts you in NBA purgatory. We decided this, despite never once attempting to build any team around him. All of that 3-point shooting and defense you want to put around a good player? Nope, we weren't acquiring these types of players. Butler should have been viewed as one of the easier players in that range to build around or with because of his ability to impact the game off the ball. Striking out over and over again in acquiring complimentary pieces is no excuse for giving up the one good thing you have.


I agree, this is a stupid reason to get rid of someone.

3.) (Some) people kept spouting fear of paying Butler a $40M contract. Nevermind that our team payroll is currently $117M and collectively cannot impact as many games as Butler individually was capable of. We all know max contracts distort NBA economics and inflate mediocre players' contracts such that stars like Butler are underpaid while role players like, say, anyone on the Bulls making $8M or more a year, are overpaid. The one argument one could make here is I suppose you could have feared Butler wouldn't maintain his play, but I at least hope we're on the same page in that Butler was worth more than $40M at the time and don't think we had significant reason to fear a coming drop-off in play.


I think it would be a significant overpay if you signed Butler to a supermax last year. His numbers since leaving the Bulls have been top 15-25 and the contract would make it extremely difficult to build around. At the same time, it would also be a massive hit to let him walk. This is where it would have been a difficult 'no win' situation. It's worth noting his supermax would cover years 31-35 of his playing career. I think you would end up in a bad spot regardless of whether you kept or moved him on that deal.

Granted, no one else could offer a supermax, so you could have tried to play hardball and offered more than what other teams would make and less than the supermax which likely would have pissed him off a lot.

4.) A huge, huge problem in starting re-building with LaVine, Lauri, and Dunn, is none of these guys should have been viewed as having a realistic chance to be good enough to one day exceed a max contract. You mention LaVine having star potential and I cannot comprehend how one could have thought that. This guy's teams had been absolutely murdered on the court for (I think it was) 3 straight years while performing significantly better without him and that was prior to him tearing his knee. The deficiencies causing this have always been evident to the eye test as he will not impact the game off the ball. Pretty much any believer of advanced stats was shouting this as loud as they could from the mountaintops since 2017 so this shouldn't be viewed as a prediction. When a player's team so routinely sucks more with him than without him, that cannot be ignored.


He was a 21 year incredible athlete that was known as being super raw coming into the league that had shown significant improvement on both ends of the floor. When doing your analysis here, you are acting like the guy was 25 and had little room to grow. Even his defense had gotten significantly better. He was known for tremendous work ethic, and historically, players whose primary deficiency is defense can often make very significant strides, especially when they have the athleticism and body to play good defense which LaVine has.

I understand that it hasn't worked out for LaVine on the defensive end (Though he continues to make improvements and has absolutely improved on the offensive end to star level). I think you're actually looking at the wrong risks. To me, the ones you mention here are trivial compared to the ACL. If LaVine doesn't tear the ACL then there's no way he's even available.

5.) I also don't think the NBA in general was high on Dunn's upside coming out of his rookie year. This wasn't a case of a guy not playing and not knowing what you have. This was a guy who had play FOUR years of college and then didn't show much his rookie year despite getting the opportunity to do so.


It's a fair point, and I don't think Dunn had superstar upside, but he had all the physical tools to be a great player.

6.) Agree it was a big loss for the Wolves, but that had nothing to do with us. Butler wanted to be here.


Would he wanted to be here 2 more years of having a crap team?

7.) Fans should have been sick of winning 40-ish games a year is no reason to trade the guy who prevented you from winning 20-25ish games a year. Again, at no point did we build around Butler with a quality supporting cast to see what Butler could do with one.


Agreed, and we also had no real opportunity to do that the following year either as we weren't under the cap and couldn't add any significant pieces to the team.

8.) Again, this isn't a prediction, but the Bulls roster has nearly no value today. In that regard, I don't know how we made out any better than the Sixers or Wolves. We don't really have anyone who is much better than their contract and I'm not sure that we should care whether Lauri or Dunn stay or go and I don't know why anyone would care if LaVine stays or goes. Carter and White might be in that group of guys who are better than their contracts for now, but they're complimentary players with nobody worth complimenting on the roster. The #4 pick, our reward for another bad season, is the Bulls most valuable asset.


Also a fair point, though I think LaVine has a lot more value than you do, but I'm not going to argue the point because I understand he's a polarizing player and that really just gets into a different discussion.

9.) Choosing an inept coach like Hoiberg over Butler stung.


Yes, but also a huge red flag on Butler as a person whom struggles to get along with many colleagues which came up again in both Minnesota and Philly. I get that "he just wants to win" and "doesn't put up with guys that don't work hard enough", but that binary view of attitudes absolutely inhibited winning in all three of his stops prior to Miami.

I hope the Bulls become great again for all of the awesome and incredibly intelligent and fun to read posters on this board like yourself (I absolutely love your posts!), but this was meaningfully bad enough moment in Bulls history to me that it shouldn't be lumped in as another prediction for me. I didn't claim to know whether the Brand/Chandler trade would work out. I didn't claim to know whether the Artest/Miller/Jalen trade would work out. I didn't claim to know whether the LaMarcus/Tyrus trade would work out. This one was simply in a different category for me.


Ironically, I think the Artest/Miller for Rose trade was far more obvious that it wouldn't work. I agree that Brand/Chandler and LaMarcus/Tyrus are in totally different categories.

At any rate, I appreciate the nuanced discussion. I can understand (absolutely) why some people felt very strongly about keeping Butler (like you did) and certainly trading him didn't work.

My personal guess (though obviously no way to know) is that the Bulls would have failed to build anything around Butler the next season would have stalled on super max extension talks, Butler's stats dipped from 10-15ish top 15-20ish the following year, and he would have demanded out from us too, just like he did with the Wolves. We would have been forced to trade him and probably wouldn't have taken the same 76ers trade, because we would have gone hard rebuild, but we'd have ended up in a similar place.

We likely wouldn't have gotten anything valuable out of the 16th pick as there wasn't much valuable to get there. I think things were coming to a head here, and that he wasn't long for Chicago based on conflicts he was already having with the team, which would have likely continued to decline, and put even more distance between him and the team in this "win or else" attitude he carried with him.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#196 » by TheStig » Wed Sep 16, 2020 11:10 am

I never understood the urgency to give up on Jimmy Butler. The guy was entering his prime, trying to recruit and was playing great. It really showed just how much they wanted to keep payroll down because no basketball person can call it a basketball move.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#197 » by Ice Man » Wed Sep 16, 2020 12:27 pm

dougthonus wrote:Yes, but also a huge red flag on Butler as a person whom struggles to get along with many colleagues which came up again in both Minnesota and Philly.


Who, exactly, do we know has had problems with Butler?

1) It seems that there was something of a Rose/Butler rivalry at one time, which is long gone
2) Unnamed young Bulls players
3) Unnamed T Wolves

That is what I can think of, and what they all have in common is that those guys were bad players (Rose was of course once great, and recovered later in his career, but he was bad at the Bulls post-injury). As he has become older, Jimmy has become increasingly impatient with bad players -- but he likes the good ones, and they seem to like him just fine in return.

Your other rebuttals were fine, although I tend to take chrispatrick's side on the overall debate. But this idea of Butler as a team cancer ... I never saw it, except for his brief second season in Minnesota, when he truly was bitching and the team's results truly were affected by his unhappiness.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#198 » by dougthonus » Wed Sep 16, 2020 12:49 pm

Ice Man wrote:Who, exactly, do we know has had problems with Butler?

1) It seems that there was something of a Rose/Butler rivalry at one time, which is long gone
2) Unnamed young Bulls players
3) Unnamed T Wolves


Not sure why you think these people are unnamed, but at a minimum, it has been alleged that he had problems with these players whom were generally the best/most notable guys on all three of these teams.

Bulls:
Rose, Noah
Wolves:
KAT, Wiggins
76ers:
Simmons

Your other rebuttals were fine, although I tend to take chrispatrick's side on the overall debate. But this idea of Butler as a team cancer ... I never saw it, except for his brief second season in Minnesota, when he truly was bitching and the team's results truly were affected by his unhappiness.


I'm not calling him a cancer. I'm saying he was a guy who was difficult to get along with. If you imagine a leader makes every situation better and a cancer makes every situation worse, then Butler isn't a cancer, but he sure as hell isn't a leader. He's a guy that can thrive and be a great help to your culture but only in a pretty specific set of circumstances.

And to be clear, my overall point on Butler is made up of three basic things:
1: We wouldn't have gotten more in trade later (backed up by the fact he was traded twice and both times for significantly less).

2: He would have likely demanded a trade from here (backed up by the fact that he left two other situations that were both better than the one he would have had here if he stayed, and he had already shown he completely disrespected our coach/direction).

3: If we kept him, he'd be on a supermax with much less talent here than he has in Miami

In short, we were going to lose either way. The reason we lose if we keep Jimmy is more due to screwing up the McDermott trade (if we had Nurkic and Harris we'd be in good shape with a Butler rebuild) and other poor drafting in that era than anything to do with Butler per se. Butler was a guy who wasn't going to tolerate rebuilding, and the Bulls had an empty cupboard to do anything with him.

The reason we lost after the trade is an unwillingness to commit to truly tanking, otherwise we might have Doncic, Young, or Jackson right now in addition to our other assets and probably feel a lot better about our future.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#199 » by TeamMan » Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:32 pm

dougthonus wrote:
Ice Man wrote:Who, exactly, do we know has had problems with Butler?

1) It seems that there was something of a Rose/Butler rivalry at one time, which is long gone
2) Unnamed young Bulls players
3) Unnamed T Wolves


Not sure why you think these people are unnamed, but at a minimum, it has been alleged that he had problems with these players whom were generally the best/most notable guys on all three of these teams.

Bulls:
Rose, Noah
Wolves:
KAT, Wiggins
76ers:
Simmons

Your other rebuttals were fine, although I tend to take chrispatrick's side on the overall debate. But this idea of Butler as a team cancer ... I never saw it, except for his brief second season in Minnesota, when he truly was bitching and the team's results truly were affected by his unhappiness.


I'm not calling him a cancer. I'm saying he was a guy who was difficult to get along with. If you imagine a leader makes every situation better and a cancer makes every situation worse, then Butler isn't a cancer, but he sure as hell isn't a leader. He's a guy that can thrive and be a great help to your culture but only in a pretty specific set of circumstances.

And to be clear, my overall point on Butler is made up of three basic things:
1: We wouldn't have gotten more in trade later (backed up by the fact he was traded twice and both times for significantly less).

2: He would have likely demanded a trade from here (backed up by the fact that he left two other situations that were both better than the one he would have had here if he stayed, and he had already shown he completely disrespected our coach/direction).

3: If we kept him, he'd be on a supermax with much less talent here than he has in Miami

In short, we were going to lose either way. The reason we lose if we keep Jimmy is more due to screwing up the McDermott trade (if we had Nurkic and Harris we'd be in good shape with a Butler rebuild) and other poor drafting in that era than anything to do with Butler per se. Butler was a guy who wasn't going to tolerate rebuilding, and the Bulls had an empty cupboard to do anything with him.

The reason we lost after the trade is an unwillingness to commit to truly tanking, otherwise we might have Doncic, Young, or Jackson right now in addition to our other assets and probably feel a lot better about our future.

Doug, for many, many, many years I have been reading you posts, and before I always thought that you were excellent in the things that you posted.

But, for the last year or two, I get this feeling that you are the boy with his finger in the dike - more interested in damage control than in a more cerebral approach to the game of basketball.

Most of what you post I agree with, but some of it, like the whole subject of Butler, I feel like you are not accepting that he is just an outstanding NBA player that just happens to have played for the Bulls.

In fact, Butler is one of the best players in the NBA at the moment, and it's unfortunate that he's an ex Bull, but that is the reality.

Hopefully, with the new FO, we can get the train back on the tracks, but Butler is our past, and we have to accept that letting him go was a mistake.

Also hopefully, our new FO will not make these same mistakes in the future.
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Re: How Good is Jimmy Butler? 

Post#200 » by troza » Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:38 pm

dougthonus wrote:
The reason we lost after the trade is an unwillingness to commit to truly tanking, otherwise we might have Doncic, Young, or Jackson right now in addition to our other assets and probably feel a lot better about our future.


That!!

Not saying that keeping Butler would be the wrong choice. But we never tanked when we should. I'm still disappointed that we didn't tank when Rose got injured (although I understand the reasons) and that we actually never go all in for the tanking costing us some of the major drafts in NBA history (yes, looking at the Lebron draft... it was so stupid of not tanking hard for that draft but it is today's me looking at the past... at that time I didn't even know the word tank and it was during 2 years that I had no NBA on TV).

And by the posts the fact is:
- Butler made his teams better. 76ers, Wolves and Bulls this season were all worse than when they had Butler
- All the things about his will to win and problems with other guys for not trying too hard... It just makes me wondering if he would fit into the dynasty team. Maybe he wasn't the best leader but he seems to have the right mindset. And I think that's why it is working fine in Miami, where there is a leader there and a coach that can deal with that.

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