MIAMI — When Jimmy Butler initially met with the Miami Heat as a free agent in 2019, he pretty much already knew he wanted to be part of the organization.
“I always tell him, he has the worst poker face in the world, which is both positive and negative,” Butler’s agent Bernie Lee said. “But I think back to that first meeting with the Heat, we were like eight minutes into our meeting with them and I had my head turned. I think I was talking to Andy [Elisburg] or [Erik Spoelstra], and he was talking to Pat [Riley] and Pat said something about identifying pieces for the Heat. Then the words come out of Jimmy’s mouth, ‘No, it’s OK. I’m in. I’m coming.’
“I turned and I looked at him. We hadn’t talked about a contract, we hadn’t talked about numbers or anything. I’m kind of looking at Jimmy like, ‘You just agreed to a deal that hasn’t even necessarily been offered to us yet. So thank you for that.’ ”
As Butler prepared for negotiations on an extension with the Heat this offseason, he already knew he wanted to stay in Miami.
“Once the window opened to have a conversation about it,” Lee said, “it was really clear that this is where Jimmy wanted to be and this is where he wants to finish his career and this is where he wants to set down roots and have success.”
That made negotiations relatively simple, as Butler met with Heat brass shortly after it became allowed to do so on Aug. 6 and signed an extension that will keep him under contract with the team through the 2025-26 season when he will be 36 years old. He’s set to earn about $220 million during the next five years.
The extension is expected to include salaries of about $45.2 million in 2023-24, $48.8 million in 2024-25 and $52.4 million in 2025-26, with the exact amounts determined when the salary cap is set in 2023. The final season of the extension is a player option for Butler, who turns 32 on Sept. 14.
“He has this moment, it comes together. He signs the deal,” Lee recalls of the day Butler signed the extension on Aug. 7. “When we were in the car leaving the arena after, instead of having the moment of driving away and thinking that you just secured something really, really large. The news comes out, and obviously both our phones are blowing up. All his questions in the car were really about all the stuff to come. I just said to him, ‘Look, now you go from the theme of potential to expectation.’
“The ownership group, the Arisons, Pat and Spo and Andy [Elisburg], they’ve all bet on him. Everybody said to him essentially, ‘We believe. Now here’s everything you need. Now you got to go out and do it.’ ”
Whether it seems realistic to those outside the organization, the expectation from the Heat is an NBA championship. Butler carries that same goal after coming up two wins short of his first title in his first season with the organization in 2019-20.
“Nothing else matters,” Lee said. “When Jimmy receives a personal accolade, it’s literally impossible to call him and tell him that he’s achieved this accolade. When I called him to tell him this year that he made All-NBA, I got the word ‘all’ out of my mouth and he hung up the phone on me. Like, he doesn’t care.”
Lee believes that Butler has benefited from the lessons the Heat learned during the latter stages of Dwyane Wade’s career. The organization’s relationship with Wade took an ugly turn when the sides could not agree on a new contract during free agent negotiations in the summer of 2016, and Wade left the Heat after 13 seasons to sign with the Chicago Bulls.
When Riley has looked back at that time, he has said not offering Wade a max contract in the summer of 2014 was his biggest mistake. Wade eventually found his way back to the Heat via trade in the middle of the 2017-18 season, and he ended his playing career in Miami.
“We’ve really benefited from Dwyane Wade being the person that came through this organization and this area first,” Lee said. “... I’ve always gotten the sense from my interactions and dealings with them, they are a group that learns from every experience they’ve had.
“I think in our experiences, it has been hugely helpful because it has been in the back of every party’s mind. So instead of letting things pile up and leaving things unsaid and having these moments where you’re just assuming what the other half is thinking, there has been like a really open and honest flow of communication. ... Then when it comes to the business end of things, there’s just an empowerment of feeling as if they really value Jimmy both as a member of the team, the community and what he represents.”
Butler’s first two seasons with the Heat included incredible highs, like the team’s run to the 2020 NBA Finals in the Walt Disney World bubble, and painful lows, like last season’s first-round sweep.
Butler is coming off of arguably the best regular season of his NBA career, averaging 21.5 points on a career-best 49.7% shooting and career highs in rebounds (6.9), assists (7.1) and steals (2.1). And he was an essential part of Miami’s winning formula, as the Heat finished the regular season with a 7-13 record in games that Butler missed and a 33-19 record when he played.
In the playoffs, Butler averaged 14.5 points on 29.7% shooting to go with 7.5 rebounds and seven assists in four games. The Heat were swept out of the first round by the eventual NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks.
Butler was named to the NBA All-Defensive Second Team and All-NBA Third Team last season.
The Heat’s roster for next season includes 14 players signed to guaranteed standard NBA contracts: Butler, Bam Adebayo, Kyle Lowry, Duncan Robinson, P.J. Tucker, Tyler Herro, KZ Okpala, Markieff Morris, Dewayne Dedmon, Victor Oladipo, Udonis Haslem, Max Strus, Gabe Vincent and Omer Yurtseven.
“During the course of time, I think it has been an open secret. Jimmy has found home,” Lee said, with Butler playing for four different teams in his first 10 NBA seasons. “This is where he’s supposed to be. He has said repeatedly and I didn’t really understand it and how profound it was. But the thing he has said repeatedly that I’ve really understood the gravity to is the fact that they allow him to be him.
“That’s not to say that they just accept everything from him as it is. They push him, they challenge him, they challenge him to see different things from a different perspective, to do things in a different way. But ultimately, they respect his process and his talent, and they nurture that. And they’ve done everything they can to give him the pieces to complement his talent and complement his intellect, and allow him to go out and do things that he has to do to have success.”
