Jimmy Butler spent the playoffs carrying the Heat and proving how wrong the Sixers were to let him go

Sometimes Mike Marquis would laugh to himself as he watched TV in the morning, as he listened to the sports-talkers on the take-fests bat around Jimmy Butler as their topic du jour. There was always an element of doubt and mystery to their discussions about Butler. Is he a superstar? Is he not a superstar? “He was still playing this week,” Marquis said. “There were a whole lot of great ones who weren’t.” But to the coach who, 15 years ago, offered Butler a scholarship seconds after seeing him walk into a gym for the first time, the secret to understanding and evaluating him is strangely simple.

Marquis had Butler for just one year at Tyler (Texas) Junior College and has known him longer than any coach since high school. It was enough for him to gain a lasting appreciation of the qualities that made Butler the most compelling player of this NBA postseason and that would have made him a perfect Philadelphia athlete had the 76ers made the bold decision to keep him here.

“When he was here, and even when I watch him now, I always thought he had a burning, burning desire either to prove himself right or prove everyone else wrong,” Marquis said in a recent phone interview from his home in Lindale, Texas. “He is as good at self-motivation as I’ve ever seen a person be.”

For Butler’s 17 games of these NBA playoffs, his power to inspire spread beyond just himself, spread to anyone who paid attention to the way he not only raised the level of his play but did so despite a bad knee and his team’s own limitations. The Golden State Warriors and Boston Celtics promise to put on an interesting Finals. But the series will be lesser for the absence of Butler and the Miami Heat and the drama of seeing Butler try single-handedly to stop Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green from winning a fourth championship together.

Instead, we’re left with the hackneyed debate over whether Butler did the right thing Sunday night in the closing moments of the Celtics’ 100-96 victory in Game 7. With the Heat down two, with the game clock melting to less than 20 seconds remaining in regulation, Butler took a wide-open, pull-up three-pointer — as good a shot as the Heat could expect to get even if coach Erik Spoelstra had signaled for a timeout to set up a play. He front-rimmed the shot, finished the game with 35 points and an empty feeling inside, and allowed the rest of us to engage in the what-ifs and should-have-dones that make our profession go ‘round.

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Around here, there shouldn’t be any hesitation in saying what’s true: A great player had a good look at a jumper to give his team a late lead. Of course Butler should have taken that shot. Of course he should have. Put it this way: After Ben Simmons last year and James Harden this year, it would have been refreshing to question whether the Sixers had a star who was too willing to take an important shot in an elimination game.

Make or miss, Butler drove home the difference between the team the Sixers could have been with him and the team they have been without him. They had a choice after the 2018-19 season: Butler or Simmons, give one a max contract and the other a ticket out of town. Whatever the Sixers’ reasonable concerns about committing to Butler then, about the arc of his career and his combustible temperament and the presumption that Simmons, as the younger player, was the better long-term investment, the subsequent evidence has reframed that decision as the NBA’s version of Peyton Manning-or-Ryan Leaf. It was an open question at the time but a choice so obvious in retrospect that, years from now, people will wonder how and why it ever could have been considered a close call.

Yes, it’s easy to say now but still worth repeating: The Sixers should have stuck with the 11-year veteran who, at 32, despite nearly 800 games of pounding and punishment, is better than he has ever been. A personality who can be so polarizing within a locker room or organization that he was traded three times in little more than two years, including, of course, to and by the Sixers. A perimeter scorer who can struggle to score from the perimeter until the games matter most.

Who made 23% of his three-point attempts during this regular season but 34% of them during the postseason. Who has six games of 40 points or more with the Heat — all of them in the playoffs, including his 47-point masterpiece in Game 6 at TD Garden, just to give the Heat a chance Sunday night. Who averaged 27.4 points this postseason, 3½ more than he has averaged during any regular season. A throwback who bucks so many of the league’s modern strategic conventions that he makes it possible to think that the sky hook will make a comeback, the collection of real-time data will go the way of the dodo, and the corner three will come to be regarded as the worst shot in the sport.

A Finals run in the COVID bubble of 2020, the brink of another Finals berth this year, a better record than the Sixers two out of three regular seasons: Somehow Pat Riley and Spoelstra were able to do what the Sixers couldn’t be bothered to try. They positioned Butler as a centerpiece of a consistently excellent team. No wonder Joel Embiid looks longingly at the success of his friend and former teammate and wonders what might have been and, perhaps, what might yet be.

“He transcends analytics,” Marquis said. “He sees two things: winning or losing. And that’s how he plays.”

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In his only season at Tyler before he moved on to Marquette, Butler shot 55% from the field and averaged 19 points a game for a team that went 25-4. There was no early sign to Marquis then of the reputation that Butler would carry from the Bulls to the Timberwolves to the Sixers to the Heat — that he’s a bear to coach and can bully his teammates.

“We didn’t see that here,” Marquis said. “I saw all the competitiveness, but our team was very close. He definitely challenged others, but not at the risk of friendships or anything else.

“People aren’t like this anymore, but his expectations for himself are what he thinks you should meet, too. And if he sees someone wasting their talent, wasting their time based on their effort, I don’t think he likes that.”

Never has. Never will. That’s why it will always be to the Sixers’ shame that they let him walk away. That’s why, make or miss, win or lose, every member of the Miami Heat will live with that pull-up three with 18 seconds left and the NBA Finals on the line. There’s only one word to describe a player who has earned the license to take that shot — superstar — and Jimmy Butler kept showing everyone, in the only way he knows, that he embodies it.