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DENVER — With the calendar hitting March, those close to Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler say he has begun the process of ramping up his body and mindset to welcome back Playoff Jimmy.
When he’s operating in his dominant two-way alter ego that gives opposing defenses fits, it’s a forceful manhandling that few players can duplicate.
How does one turn on a switch like that?
“You mean how can I turn into the greatest basketball player in the world all of a sudden?” Butler told Bleacher Report. “I don’t know, man.”
In their first meeting since losing to the Denver Nuggets in the 2023 NBA Finals, the Heat came up short Thursday night in a 103-97 defeat.
Immediately after the game in the Heat’s locker room, Butler produced a scene and a sound most wouldn’t expect to encounter after a hard-fought loss to the team responsible for ending their 2022-23 season on a sour note.
Butler, who recorded 21 points and seven rebounds in 40 minutes, was sitting at his locker consuming his postgame meal with his cellphone connected to a speaker crooning to slow jams.
The star forward sung along to tracks “Small Talk” and “Poet” by Neo Soul singer Malia. His eyes were closed as if he genuinely felt each lyric.
His teammates just continued getting dressed as if this was a normal occurrence.
With 23 games left to play, the Heat sit eighth in the Eastern Conference standings with a record of 33-26. Slowing the music down is apparently one way of fast-tracking Butler’s approach for a stretch run.
“I’m just different,” Butler told B/R, followed by a chuckle. “I think this is when you’re supposed to be playing your best basketball and you have to find a way to get your team to win these games when you’re talking about the playoffs coming around. But even right now, you’re getting everybody into their roles. You’re getting in a rhythm. And with my music, I’m getting in my rhythm. Speaking for myself and everybody else in this locker room, we want to win. That’s our focus.”
Butler has embraced his alter ego, but he insists he’s only doing what stars are supposed to do in big games.
“You just keep a couple things in your pocket all year long, and whenever you do it at a certain point of the year, they deem it something else like ‘Playoff Jimmy,'” Butler explained. “But it’s just me playing the long game throughout the season. I know that I’m really good at this game, and I know I could do a lot of things well on the basketball court. There are just times when you have to step it up a notch. You can’t show the opponent everything now. You have to always keep people guessing.”
The objective for most championship-contending teams is to go into the playoffs healthy. Surprisingly, that isn’t the main priority for the Heat.
“No, it’s not even about going into the playoffs healthy, but about getting all your competitors lined up together to take on this challenge,” Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra told B/R. “You can’t control who’s available. It’s more of a mentality.
“It’s the hardest thing that you try to do collectively as a group is to win a championship. There’s so much that goes into it emotionally, physically, spiritually, and then there has to be a connectivity with all that to be able to accomplish it.”
Spoelstra and players admit the Finals loss to Denver still sticks with them.
“It is tough. There’s no question about it,” Spoelstra said. “There’s no solace in making it that far and coming up short. But it happened, and you have to take ownership for that and also give credit to Denver. They were fantastic in that series, and they earned it all the way through it.
“Sometimes pain can drive the most growth collectively in this profession. Sometimes winning can be the worst teacher, and losing sometimes unfortunately can be the greatest teacher. And that pain sometimes can motivate you and drive you to a necessary level. The one thing we all realized is we needed and we need to get to a higher level to be able to finish the job.”
“You can’t really put a timetable on getting over a Finals loss because there are moments where you’d just be eating and you might see a basketball and you just start thinking about it,” Heat center Bam Adebayo told B/R. “So you can’t really put a timetable on it.
“I feel like it is easier when you get lost into the season because then you are worried about so much other stuff. And then once the game ends, you get almost a full month to do nothing. So all you do is think about the fact that we lost and they won. Obviously you see all the celebrations and s–t going on. All you can do is nod your head to that and tip your cap because they did win, but we also want one for ourselves.”
No matter the seeding, the Heat are a serious threat to any Eastern Conference challenger if they clinch a playoff spot.
Having just gone 5-1 through a rigorous six-game road trip, the Heat believe they’ve found a stride that can carry on for the final quarter of the season.
And it’s the most opportune time to find that stride considering it’s typically the time that Butler finds his.
“Whatever y’all want to call it, ‘Playoff Jimmy,’ or ‘that crazy motherf–ker Emo Jimmy,’ I don’t care,” Butler told B/R. “We’re good, man. I just wanna get into the playoffs. That’s it. We get into the playoffs, then we and I can take care of a lot. But I think us as a group, we’re going to be just fine.”
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