Jimmy Butler’s return to Miami a bust as Warriors lose again without Stephen Curry

Jimmy Butler played the classic “this is just another game” card before his return to Miami in a Warriors uniform on Tuesday night, but rest assured, scoring 11 points in a 26-point Golden State loss was definitely not what he had in mind. 

You can also be sure that the Heat playing like this wasn’t an accident. They came in having lost 10 of their last 11 and suddenly looked reinvigorated. Butler, who was honored before the game with a tribute video and drew a lukewarm reaction from a mostly indifferent, late-arriving Miami crowd, definitely brought it out in his former team. 

Bam Adebayo barely waited one minute before dunking on Butler. 

As for his current team, the Warriors have lost two straight without Stephen Curry, who is on the mend after a hard fall last week, to effectively fall back below the playoff line. Yes, the standings show them ahead of the Clippers for the No. 6 seed, but they’re tied in the loss column and L.A. owns the tiebreaker. 

The good news for the Warriors is they have two days off and are expected to get Curry back on Friday when they play at New Orleans, which should be a win. Then they play the Spurs, which should be another win. But these losses are huge as the Warriors walk the very fine line between banking a playoff spot and having to win their way in, which wouldn’t be a lock. 

In a one-game scenario, anything can happen. They’d get the Timberwolves in the 7-8 matchup if the season ended today, and Minnesota, a conference finalist last season that has one of the league’s seven or eight best players in Anthony Edwards and has gotten solid play of late from Julius Randle, would be a real test. If they were to lose that, they would play ether Sacramento or Phoenix in a one-and-done situation. Even if they won that, they would match up with the No. 1 seed Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round. 

This is not a scenario that Golden State wants to flirt with, and it looked like they were steaming toward a sure playoff spot with 15 wins in their first 18 games with Butler on board. But they’ve slipped. They took a terrible loss against Denver, which was playing without Nikola Jokić, Jamal Murray and Christian Braun, and now the Hawks and Heat have outscored them by 35 points. 

Butler has been mostly great for the Warriors, though a little frustrating in his inability, or at times unwillingness, to finish at the rim. He’s been a connector and stabilizer and has given the Warriors what could potentially be a season-changing free-throw threat. But overall, he’s been relatively passive as a scorer. He scored two points in the first half on Tuesday. By the time he got even a little aggressive, the Warriors were down 17 at the break, and he didn’t score a single fourth-quarter point before he was pulled for good with seven minutes and change to go.

There’s a methodical element to Butler’s game to appreciate, but it can slip into malaise. Even when he catches deep he’s at times pump-faking to a fault and has lacked any semblance of vertical explosion on attempts such as this one on Tuesday, which was batted away by Kel’el Ware.

All of this said, Butler was never supposed to be the go-to guy for this Warriors team. He’s shown he can be a star in a secondary role to Curry, and the hope is that Playoff Jimmy is still in there somewhere, because there will probably come a point in the postseason when Golden State will need him to truly take over. 

But for this one night in Miami, Butler, whose passivity (and Adebayo’s defense) was perhaps most evident in his one free-throw attempt, didn’t have it. And by extension, neither did the Warriors.