Jimmy Butler plays a sad brand of basketball. And it was on display Wednesday night against the Indiana Pacers. It’s a style of gameplay that is creeping across the NBA, and it makes the product generally difficult to watch.
Here seems to be the general formula.
- Drive the lane.
- Put up a ridiculous shot.
- Contort your body in ridiculous positions as if it has been hit by a semi-truck.
Once you’ve done this you have two different options it seems.
- Get the call and mean look everyone around you as if you’re the tough guy who is flopping all over the court.
- Not get the call and get irate with the ref crew who might dare to suggest that you are obviously exaggerating the contact.
The true hypocrisy of this strategy in the case of Butler
And there we go. I’ve just summed up all of Jimmy Butler’s game plan. And I don’t think it would rub people the wrong way if there wasn’t an incredible amount of hypocrisy built into it. Jimmy Butler tries to play the tough guy on the court, just remember him trying to intimidate our own TJ Warren a few years ago. But see, this is exactly the problem. How do you claim to be the tough one on the court, when you can’t get breathed on without falling to the ground?
The Oscar-worthy performances were on display on Wednesday night, with Butler flopping every which way against the Pacers. And don’t get me wrong, tons of players across the league do this every night. Luka is a culprit, Kyle Lowry, James Harden, and even our own Bennedict Mathurin does this to some degree.
However, Butler seems to take this strategy to new heights and combine it with trying to look like the toughest person on the court.
The NBA wants to end flopping? Quit enabling.
If the NBA wants to end flopping, which has been addressed in previous offseasons, they need to quit enabling those who do it. Additional calls for stars and rewarding players like Butler who consistently flail is what propagates the problem. They addressed the growing problem of take-fouls this past offseason, they need to go after flopping even harder in the one to comes.
However, there is always the chance that perhaps this is what they want basketball to look like in the NBA. If so, they are hitting it out of the park.