Miami Heat: This false Jimmy Butler narrative is being destroyed

The Miami Heat landed the enigmatic Jimmy Butler this past summer. What came with Butler were the talks of “baggage”, but that isn’t quite the reality.

The Miami Heat’s resident superstar, Jimmy Butler, has quickly asserted himself by enveloping himself into every aspect of Miami possible. Whether it be his early appearance playing dominoes in Little Havana’s Domino Park, or how quickly he has become a fan favorite and favorite of his teammates, everything screams perfection when thinking about how he has transitioned so far.

While this isn’t that hard to understand, considering what we know about the similarities between Butler and the Miami Heat organization, it differs greatly from what some would have had you to believe. What this notion points to is the false narrative that was created about the guy during his time in the league thus far.

This narrative was derived based on his time in Chicago, Philadelphia, and mainly Minnesota. If you ask some(especially 76er fans), they’ll say he is toxic within an organization, Selfish, cancerous to the locker room, or a poor leader. While it is still early, that appears to be the furthest thing from the actual truth.

When talking about his status as a leader, he has quickly come in and garnered the respect of his teammates. One example of such is how he now famously reported to training camp practices about seven hours ahead of time. What’s impressive about this whole situation is the fact that before you knew it, he wasn’t the only Miami Heat player to show up early.

It wasn’t just Meyers Leonard that Butler had rubbed off on though. According to another tweet from Leonard’s profile, there was another Miami Heat big man up at the crack of dawn as well.

Said leader he’s talking about seems to be Jimmy Butler. If you ask another fan base from a team that Butler formerly played on, the Philadelphia 76er fan base to be exact, they’ll make an attempt to say that Butler was an awful leader and bad for the team environment. Not so fast though, here is a tweet from Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald that details exactly what the Philadelphia 76er’s best player had to say about his former teammate.

The proof is in the pudding they say, or in this case, the tweet. At the end of the day, you can say what you feel or like about Jimmy Butler, but that doesn’t make it true.

One of the last things that you tend to hear thrown around about JImmy Butler is that he is selfish. In terms of being a pro athlete, that means that he is more about his stats than the overall success of the team. While that premise seems false on the surface alone, based on his play and how he has gone about operating throughout his career thus far, there is more solid evidence that I would say backs this up.

In the above tweet from the twitter account of Miami based sportswriter Ethan Skolnick, Jimmy Butler responds to a question referring to him as the “best player” on the Heat team by essentially questioning whether he is the best player on this team.

While there are quite a few assertions that can be drawn from his response, the most appropriate one for this instance is the fact that a selfish guy wouldn’t say that. A selfish player would not only not say that, but he would embrace and encourage being labeled that way.

There are two things that we are certain of here, with the first being that this whole narrative that has been created about Jimmy Butler seemed false at first glance from a distance, and definitely has proven to be thus far from a first-hand perspective. The second thing here is that we are definitely glad that he is now on our side and we can’t wait to see him in action!