It’s been a few days since we’ve had a good Jimmy Butler trade rumor. The last thing we heard was that the Minnesota Timberwolves’ asking price to the Miami Heat for the All-NBA guard involved a pair of young players, a pick, and perhaps unloading the bloated contract of Gorgui Dieng.
Fast forward to Friday and our latest rumor popped up, one which says the Los Angeles Clippers are still pushing to acquire Butler’s services. Here’s what’s up with that, per Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports:
In any deal with the Clippers, Minnesota would prefer to acquire forward Tobias Harris, sources said. Various trade packages have been proposed on both sides, but the Clippers do not intend to trade Harris, sources said.
The Timberwolves’ brass hasn’t fully engaged the Clippers’ pitches, sources said, because it is believed that president of basketball operations/head coach Tom Thibodeau is holding out hope that he can persuade Butler to rescind his trade request.
It’s becoming a common refrain in any deal that is rumored for Butler. A team will make some type of offer, Minnesota expresses its desire to get back something kind of absurd (in this case, it’s Harris, for whom the Clippers have high hopes this season), and then, we hear that there are rumblings that Tom Thibodeau isn’t willing to give up on convincing Butler to come back just yet. That’s been the most common thread throughout the Butler saga: Despite the fact that it looks like there’s nothing the Timberwolves can do to convince him to stay with the team this season, Thibodeau is undermining the entire process.
In fairness to Thibodeau, this makes sense. Butler is a great player and someone who is not easy to replicate, plus there’s a chance that Thibodeau is on the hot seat, a drowning man doing anything he can to grab hold to a potential lifesaver. He’s been in wars with Butler, and a war for his job might be on the horizon, so why on earth would he go down without his most trusted soldier in his corner?
That was on display on Friday morning, when Thibodeau said this about Butler potentially rejoining the team.
Thibs: We’re trying to get something done (with Butler). No deadline for them set yet in terms of Jimmy rejoining the team
— Jon Krawczynski (@JonKrawczynski) October 5, 2018
Will it work? Who knows! Butler is not the kind of guy who will sit on the sidelines if he’s able to play basketball, he’s wired to go out on the floor and dive for loose balls and play every possession like it’s his last. A report popped up the other day saying that he has no plans to miss out on any games as long as he’s healthy, which would make for this astoundingly awkward situation where an openly-disgruntled Butler has to play for a franchise he wants to leave, alongside teammates who he might not actually like.
Thibodeau wants to have a job, one which leads to him getting a paycheck and being able to take care of his bills, like everyone else on earth. He has done the calculus and decided that the best way for him to continue to make that happen is to, apparently, undermine trade talks and keep Butler around at any cost. That might mean he loses his job at the end of the season, but if that’s going to happen regardless, he’s going to do whatever he can to keep Butler around, even if it means he refuses to admit that the best course of action for everyone else involved is to just accept the inevitable and let Butler leave the Timberwolves.
