Sixers

We Don’t Need “Sixers Should Have Kept Jimmy Butler” Tweets After Every Miami Win

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: May 18th, 2023 · 10:10 AM EDT

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Philly sports fans love nothing more than tweeting that the Sixers should have kept Jimmy Butler after every big playoff performance for the Miami Heat.

Case in point, Wednesday night, when Jimmy put up 35, 5, and 7 in an Eastern Conference Finals game one win up in Boston. He shot close to 50% from the floor and looked like the dawg we know he can be, leading to responses like this:

Just imagine if the Sixers had a playoff killer like Jimmy Butler. pic.twitter.com/lB0SjWLXUe

— Russ Joy (@JoyOnBroad) May 18, 2023

Not a hot take. Of course the Sixers would have been better off if Butler had stayed and Ben Simmons and/or Tobias Harris had gone. But when Butler WAS on the roster, and the Sixers were in the second round, they didn’t get the Jimmy Butler you’re seeing now. Jimmy was 29 years old during his Philly stint and got so much better when he left.

I think people sometimes forget what Butler did in the 2019 Toronto series. That was a tough, physical one against the eventual champs, but he was not the Jimmy you’re seeing now. He had one 30-point game that series, and in the four games the Sixers lost, he did the following:

• 25-60 from the field (41.6%)
• 4-18 from three (22.2%)
• 77 points (25 from the foul line)
• 17 assists
• 23 rebounds
• some bad game 7 fourth quarter possessions

Nobody should need reminding about the fourth quarter of game seven in Toronto. Jimmy and the Sixers had some ROUGH possessions to close it out, which included a shot clock violation, an airball, and then a trip to the line in which Butler only hit one of two. The basket they scored to tie the game was when Jimmy got out on a rare transition opportunity off a missed Kawhi Leonard free throw.

You know as well as I do that the Sixers’ half court offense was brutal down the stretch, and you can talk about Embiid and Simmons and Brett Brown all you want, but Jimmy shot 5-14 in that game and finished 1-6 from three. We didn’t get the Butler of 2020, 2021, 2022, and now 2023. The dude you’re watching now took his play to another level that most of us admittedly did not think was possible, and maybe that’s the result of him going to a place like Miami where he could be the main guy and thrive in that hard-nosed culture. There’s no guarantee he would have turned into this had the Sixers been able to keep him here.

Point being, the hindsight tweets feel a little empty because 2019 Jimmy was not the player he is now. Yeah he was a dawg, but not as frequently as he is in 2023. He’s got five 30+ point performances in these playoffs alone, but only did that twice in 17 playoff games for the Sixers and Timberwolves. He only reached 30 four times during his entire Chicago tenure as well, which included 38 postseason games spanning five years. So if he has another 30+ performance in these playoffs, he’ll have matched his Chicago, Philly, and Minnesota playoff total in just one postseason.

Jimmy’s different now. If we got this Jimmy back in 2019, or maybe a better shooting performance in game seven in Toronto, then maybe the trajectory of the Sixers’ franchise would have changed forever. But we didn’t get that Jimmy, so we move on.