Jimmy Butler has been the lead story in NBA news for three weeks after making his trade request to the Minnesota Timberwolves, but on Wednesday he escalated the situation by showing up to practice and making quite the scene.
Butler apparently challenged Tom Thibodeau, GM Scott Layden, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Andrew Wiggins at practice, where he apparently took the third-stringers and beat the starters in a scrimmage. At one point, he reportedly yelled over to Layden, “you f*cking need me,” while beating up on the starters.
The reaction on Twitter was what one would expect, one of shock and giddiness at the salacious details coming out of Minnesota. Later in the afternoon, Butler sat down with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols for his first interview since his trade request, and explained, among other things, why practice went as it did, admitting “a lot” of the reports about his actions were true and explaining he was just being passionate and “brutally honest.”
"All my emotion came out at one time."
Jimmy Butler sat down with @Rachel__Nichols to talk about today's practice and what led to it. See more on SportsCenter at 6 ET and NBA Countdown at 7 ET 📺 pic.twitter.com/znPpDwyW9y
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) October 10, 2018
Butler says people will say he went about it the wrong way, but believes he was justified in what he did, saying that’s what you get from him and he is just being honest with how he feels. He says he wouldn’t have taken any offense if any of his teammates had come up to him and confronted him about it and told him he went about it the wrong way.
This is all really a master class from Butler in using the only leverage he has to force the trade he’s already asked for and not yet been granted. Butler can go in, be a disrupter in practice, all under the guise of passion for his return to the basketball court.
