Trade grades: Jimmy Butler to the Golden State Warriors!
The Miami Heat and Golden State Warriors complete a four-team trade to put Jimmy Butler on the West Coast
Shams finally dropped the bomb at 8:14 pm. Pat Riley and the Miami Heat have traded Jimmy Butler to the Golden State Warriors, where he’ll team up with Stephen Curry and Draymond Green for one last stand.
The details, which are still evolving on the margins (likely some seconds will exchange hands):
Heat receive: Andrew Wiggins, Kyle Anderson, PJ Tucker, 2025 top-10 protected pick (it rolls over to 2026 with same protections if not conveyed this year, then to 2027 unprotected)
Warriors receive: Jimmy Butler
Jazz receive: Dennis Schroder
Pistons receive: Lindy Waters III, Josh Richardson
Let’s start with what Miami gets back and save the sexy part for the end. Andrew Wiggins is perfectly cromulent as a starting small forward. His scoring has been solid — 17.6 points per game on 56.5% true shooting (38% from deep) is nice, and he’s drawing free throws again. He’s still a below-average defensive rebounder (remember when he randomly turned into Mose Malone in the playoffs during Golden State’s 2022 championship run?) and robotic passer. His on-ball defense is solid, and his off-ball defense has improved to the point where it isn’t brutal.
But add it all up, and except for one perfectly-timed season, you’ve got a guy who has always been less than the sum of his parts. Defenses don’t really respect Wiggins’ jumper, and his athleticism has notably declined (although he can occasionally trick you with a huge dunk) — his finishing numbers have slid substantially in the last few years.
None of that is to say that Wiggins is a bad or even mediocre player. He’s just not a good one, despite his sparkly point totals, and he’s owed a combined $58 million over the next two seasons — a pretty penny for an okay starter. That said, $58M is less than half the cost of Jimmy Butler’s new extension (we’ll discuss that below). The price difference will result in substantial savings for Miami, although it notably does not free them up in the summer of 2026, for which they’d claimed to be prioritizing cap space.
Wiggins can eat up minutes, and he’ll undoubtedly feast on plenty of those for a Heat team motivated to make the playoffs this season to avoid some cascading pick-protection problems.
Kyle Anderson is literally nicknamed “Slow-mo,” but it’s not the backhanded compliment it used to be. Anderson is the sort of oddly tooled player that Erik Spoelstra has traditionally loved to find untraditional uses for, and it wouldn’t shock me to see him playing pivotal parts in the Heat’s zone defenses or running point guard at times. It also wouldn’t shock me to see the fading 31-year-old glued to the bench.
PJ Tucker was a surprise addition; they’ll have to buy some WD-40 to get the old guy moving again, and it had better be extra-strength. Tucker hasn’t been a particularly helpful NBA player since he was last in Miami, during the 2021-2022 season. Spoelstra is the only coach in memory that let Tucker do more than just sit in the corner not shooting threes; we’ll see if he can re-discover some of his funky floater game. Realistically, he won’t see much court time except in a broken-glass-emergency kind of way.
The pick will likely be in the teens this year, although there is a chance the Warriors could miss the playoffs and end up in the low end of the lottery. The Heat have made hay in the middle of the draft before. It’s a decent asset to have.
Combined, this package isn’t remotely worth what a happy Jimmy Butler brought to the table.
That said, what were the Heat to do? You don’t trade a happy Jimmy Butler. They reportedly shopped him around to Phoenix, Jimmy’s preferred destination, but the Suns could not find someone willing to take Bradley Beal’s contract (and Beal’s no-trade clause also came into play). That took them off the board, and only one team emerged willing to trade positive value and also pay Jimmy Butler the money he feels he’s earned (give or take Memphis; I’d love to hear firm reporting on what that deal would have been).
To some extent, this is just about getting out of the Jimmy Butler business. While disappointed in the return, Pat Riley is probably ecstatic that Butler didn’t get his wish to go to the Suns. Most Heat fans are simply relieved to wash their hands of Butler and move forward with a surprisingly fun young-ish core of Tyler Herro, Bam Adebayo, Kel’el Ware, Nikola Jovic, Jaime Jaquez Jr, and (charitably) Haywood Highsmith.
Heat grade: C
From Golden State’s perspective, Butler is as complicated a piece as you’ll find in the NBA. On the one hand, he’s a total basket case.