AirP. wrote:VDT wrote:I only watched parts of the 4th quarter. If i am not mistaken he had one basket that he actually created plus another transition basket he got from a steal he made. The other points were fts i think.
He is not a dominant player. He hustles a lot and gets some savvy calls but the Heat can largely function as a team regardless of what he is doing.
It is weird that he leaves Chicago and they went from a playoff team to one of the worst teams in the league, he got Minnesota to the playoffs for the 1st time in nearly a decade and a half... and before he went down the last 6 weeks he had Minnesota in the 3rd seed in the West and then.. nowhere close to the playoffs.  Philly, they took the eventual champs to 7 game, the next year... swept.
It's odd how he makes his teams so much better yet he's not a dominate player.  Not many "non dominate" players able to put up 40 points in a half... Butler has.  This season, when some sports reporters in Miami complained about him not scoring he put up 30 in the first half against Phoenix to prove a point then only shot 6 more times in the 2nd half.
By the way, Butler's doing this stuff in the 4th quarter in the Eastern Conference Finals...
Philly should be in the position Miami is in... all they had to do was not trade Butler and have Embiid ask him to stay.
 
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.