Where there is smoke, there is fire. Trouble in paradise. Heat president and Hall of Fame coach Pat Riley said Thursday afternoon that his team has no intentions of trading or getting out of the Jimmy Butler business, despite ongoing speculations and persistent rumors.
“We usually don’t comment on rumors, but all this speculation has become a distraction to the team and is not fair to the players and coaches,” Riley said in a statement posted on the team’s social media. “Therefore, we will make it clear – We are not trading Jimmy Butler.”
The emphatic statement comes 24 hours after ESPN’s senior NBA insider Shams Charania reported that Butler, a six-time NBA All-Star and two-time Eastern Conference champion, would prefer to be traded by the Miami Heat before the February 6 trade deadline. Butler has reportedly not gone through the steps and made a formal trade request to the Heat, but is ready to take his talents elsewhere and find greener pastures, and Charania reported earlier this month that the Heat are not opposed to making a deal happen.
Butler has a substantial $52 million player option for the 2025-26 season that he has informed teams that are interested in his services, he intends to decline, according to Charania, allowing him to become an unrestricted free agent and hit the market after the season. He could have met with the Heat and hammered out a long-term extension prior to these rumors gained any steam, but the Heat were playing it cautiously, according to Pat Riley at his end-of-season press conference last spring, due to Butler’s recent injury history and lack of availability.
Butler has never taken the floor in more than 58 games in a regular season for the Heat.
The only team with significant cap space this offseason, as of this writing, is the Brooklyn Nets. The Nets are in the process of a rebuild and are not expected to go after an older, big-name free agent in the near future. That means for Butler to get the long-term stability and contract he desires, he would have to get traded now, so that a team that wants to keep him has his Bird Rights in the offseason. He reportedly prefers a title contender, with teams such as the Houston Rockets, Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors and Phoenix Suns reportedly on his wish list.
Both the Heat and Butler’s camp have vehemently denied that a trade request has been made, according to Ira Winderman of the Sun-Sentinel. While this news does not directly go against Charania’s reporting, which also states that a formal request has not been made, it should be noted that Butler’s representation, Bernie Lee, has called out and pushed back heavily on Charania’s prior reporting on Butler trade rumors. In a series of tweets, he called Charania’s reporting “complete and utter made up bulls—” and that “all this is fabricated.”
The Miami Herald added that “according to a source, Butler was also disappointed that the Heat did not publicly deny a December 10 ESPN report that Miami was open to trading him.” The organization has now done just that. The question remains, is it too late.
The Heat are sitting one game above .500, 14-13 so far this season. They have been a Play-In Tournament team in each of the past two seasons, including when they made their run to the 2023 NBA Finals, where they lost to the Denver Nuggets in five games. According to Charania, they are ready to start and lean on the rising, younger core of Tyler Herro and Bam Adebayo, and given their extensive history of retooling quickly, they could potentially use the return on a Butler deal to jumpstart whatever the next phase of Heat basketball turns out to be.
