How Jimmy Butler is elevating the Warriors as a title threat

This version of the Warriors always needed something. Its formula relied heavily on elite defense and the magic of Stephen Curry, with little else in the way of dependable offense; even when it exploded out of the gate with a 12-3 start, Golden State scored at a bottom-five clip whenever Steph took a seat.

That was the idea behind the Warriors’ mid-December trade for Dennis Schröder: to try to inject new life into what had become a bottom-third offense, and to make the latest in a long line of attempts to stanch the bleeding whenever Curry stepped away. But despite the post-trade insistence that a high-pick-and-roll playmaker would be a beneficial addition to a team that under head coach Steve Kerr has — sometimes obstinately — eschewed overreliance on the most popular play in basketball, Schröder didn’t fit in, averaging 10.6 points per game on 38/32/74 shooting splits. The Warriors were outscored by 9.9 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with Schröder on the floor, according to Cleaning the Glass, continuing to score at a basement-dwelling level when he operated while Curry sat.

The Schröder acquisition was a half-measure, and by the time the Feb. 6 trade deadline rolled around — with the Warriors sitting at .500, tied for ninth in the West — it was clear that a half-measure wouldn’t do. No: If you want to move the needle, you need a needle-mover.

And whatever else he might be, Jimmy Butler is most certainly one of those.

After handling the Hornets on Monday, Golden State enters Tuesday’s visit to Madison Square Garden to take on the Knicks at 8-2 since adding Butler, and 8-1 in games in which he plays. (He missed Saturday’s loss to the 76ers with back spasms.) The post-trade uptick includes the Warriors’ first five-game winning streak since the opening weeks of the season, before injuries and inconsistency sent them on the months-long spiral that clarified their need for a big swing.

Butler hasn’t overwhelmed opponents with superstar production, averaging a fairly modest 16 points, 5.4 rebounds, 5.4 assists and 1.2 steals in 30.2 minutes per game in Golden State. (I say “fairly modest” because there’s only 13 other players hitting those numbers this season, and every one of them except Desmond Bane has made at least one All-Star team.) He’s struggling to get his shot online — he’s missed 15 of his 17 3-point tries since the trade, and made just 50.7% of his attempts in the paint as a Warrior, down from 61.2% in Miami earlier this season — and has tailed off over the past couple of games, due partly to back spasms and partly to overall offensive stagnation.

His overall impact, however, has been immediate and clear. Butler’s producing .217 win shares per 48 minutes in Golden State; the only players topping that mark while using at least 20% of their teams’ offensive possessions are MVP front-runners Nikola Jokić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Giannis Antetokounmpo, All-NBA-if-not-for-injuries big man Anthony Davis, and Cavaliers super-sub Ty Jerome. The Warriors have outscored opponents by a massive 14.7 points-per-100 with Butler on the floor, according to Cleaning the Glass.

That’s also their overall net rating since the trade — third-best in the NBA in that span, with the Dubs fielding top-five units on both ends of the floor since his arrival, and looking an awful lot like a team that found what it was looking for on a few different fronts.

Draymond Green was looking for, as “one team source described it” to The Athletic, “another ‘a**hole’” — a maniacal, unflinching competitor capable of helping restore the defensive snarl that has characterized the dynastic Warriors nearly as much as the shooting of Curry and Klay Thompson. Jimmy, um, is one of those; it’s no wonder that the deal left Green feeling emboldened to immediately start making grand championship proclamations.

Kerr was looking for a shock to the system powerful enough to disrupt what he’d come to view as an increasingly maddening malaise.

“I snap every handful of games,” Kerr told Logan Murdock of The Ringer earlier this season. “I f***ing lose my mind, and I go crazy in the locker room. Nobody out here sees it, but I’ve smashed a clipboard and I’ve slammed my fist against the wall. … We hate losing. We’re not used to it.”

In Butler — a bona fide two-way star with the outsized personality to match — Kerr found his defibrillator.

“Sometimes you’ve got to shake things up, and we shook things up,” Kerr said. “It just so happened that one of the best players in the league was available.”

Not just one of the best players, though — also one who can elevate a team without needing to dominate it. Since Butler made his Golden State debut on Feb. 8, 414 NBA players have averaged at least five minutes per game. Among that group, Butler ranks eighth in the league in front-court touches per game … but just 74th in average time of possession, 121st in average seconds per touch and 165th in average dribbles per touch.

Butler doesn’t require an architecture purpose-built for him. He moves the ball and his body, screening and cutting and probing for advantages; when he doesn’t find them, he doesn’t force them, keeping the machine whirring and living to fight another day. He’s a threat the defense has to account for when a shot goes up — more than half of his rebounds in Golden State have come on the offensive glass — and a steady hand at the wheel of the offense, with a sparkling 49-to-11 assist-to-turnover ratio through his first nine games in blue and gold. The Warriors’ overall turnover rate has dropped from 14% of their offensive possessions before the trade down to 12.3% since — third-lowest in the league.

“Honestly — in the most humble way possible — I’m a good fit everywhere,” Butler recently said.

He addresses Golden State’s need for paint touches. Prior to the trade, no Warrior averaged more than 8.8 drives to the basket per game — one reason why they ranked 26th in the share of their shot attempts that came at the rim. Butler has provided a fresh dose of rim pressure, driving to the cup a team-high 10.8 times per game and helping boost the Warriors up to 14th in rim rate over the last 10 games.

He gives them another ball-handler capable of creating advantages in isolation. Including the plays where he passes out to a teammate, the Warriors are scoring a scorching 1.27 points per possession that features Butler attacking one-on-one, according to Synergy — a critical bailout resource for making something out of nothing when Kerr’s motion offense stalls:

Butler also adds more variety and spice to the Warriors offense by giving Curry, Green, Brandin Podziemski and Co. a new partner in the two-man game — one who can calmly read the floor after receiving the ball on the roll, pick out the appropriate pass in space and knock down shots on the short roll. He’s shooting 45% from floater range in Golden State; he has ranked in the 90th percentile or better in points produced per possession as the roll man in the pick-and-roll in three of the past five seasons, according to Synergy.

He gives Kerr a new weapon to deploy in punishing switching defenses by slipping screens to beat scrambling defensive rotations, or by dumping the ball into the post for him to operate. Butler can survey the floor as Golden State’s guards go into their familiar split actions and deliver the ball to cutters, drive the lane and kick out to open shooters, or just go to work playing bully-ball on the block; he’s scored 44 points on 35 post-ups this season, according to Synergy, shooting 15-for-28 (53.6%) from the floor on those plays.

Crucially, Butler also offers an answer to the age-old question of where the Warriors can turn when they can’t turn to Curry.

For most of the season — and, really, ever since Kevin Durant headed east — Curry needing a breather meant the Warriors’ chances went on life support. Over the last few weeks, though, those perilous stints have given Golden State a new lease on life. Before the Butler trade, the Dubs were getting outscored by 2.9 points-per-100 with Steph off the floor. Since bringing Jimmy in, though? That’s up to plus-5.2 points-per-100 in non-Steph minutes — and a whopping 27.4 points-per-100 when Butler’s on the floor while Steph takes a siesta.

“The plus-minus tells the whole story,” Curry recently told reporters. “Totally different than what it was before, where you felt a little pressure to create separation because we were trying to fill some holes in those minutes.”

That pressure has been alleviated somewhat by Butler’s gift for grift: The Warriors were 28th in free-throw attempt rate before he joined the team, and they’re 10th since, with Jimmy ranking in the top 10 in the league in personal fouls drawn and free throw attempts per 36 minutes to help keep the offense afloat.

The Warriors have also helped their cause by cranking up the pressure they apply on the defensive end, conceding just 98.6 points-per-100 in Jimmy/no-Steph minutes — and a downright suffocating 93.3 points-per-100 when Butler shares those minutes with Green and Podziemski in a frenetic, tough, active and physical defensive group.

The Warriors are third in the NBA in steals, sixth in deflections and 11th in blocks since trading for Butler. They’re 6-0 since Kerr fully shifted to a new-look small-ball starting five — Green at center; Butler, Podziemski and Moses Moody on the wing; Curry at the point — that has outscored opponents by 30 points in 73 minutes. By downsizing to emphasize quickness and disruption, the rate at which the Warriors are forcing turnovers has spiked, from 14.6% of opponents’ trips before the trade all the way up to 18.8% since — second-most in the NBA in that span.

A player like Butler — 6-foot-7, 230 pounds, with the strength and quickness to guard all along the positional spectrum, and impeccable defensive instincts — gives Kerr and defensive coordinator Jerry Stackhouse more options to toggle through in pursuit of stops. The Warriors have played more zone since Jimmy’s arrival — according to Synergy, 55 of Golden State’s 108 zone possessions this season have come since the trade — and have played it more effectively, giving up just 43 points on those 55 trips (0.78 points per possession, which would be by far the stingiest rate of any team going zone at least once per game over the full season).

At age 35, Butler might not be quite as smothering at the point of attack as the Dubs’ former top stopper, Andrew Wiggins. But he can still guard pretty much anyone on a given possession, muck plays up as the low man patrolling the back line, and is at his best playing free safety to blow up actions and put out fires — a skill set pretty similar to Green’s. As it turns out, having two of those guys is better than having just one: Golden State has allowed 104.8 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with Green and Butler on the court, a mark that would top even the historically elite Thunder defense over the course of the full season.

Tally up the buckets Butler scores, the ones he generates via assist and the ones he opens up with his screening, and he’s been responsible for 41 points for the Warriors per 36 minutes of floor time, using the Points Created metric cooked up by Zach Kram, now of ESPN — more than any Warrior but Curry (45.4) this season. Add up the department-by-department improvements since he joined up — more trips to the free throw line, more offensive rebounds, fewer turnovers committed, more turnovers forced — and you see a team thriving by consistently giving itself more bites at the apple.

Before the trade, the Warriors were generating 2.1 more possessions per game than their opponent, according to analysis by Jared Dubin at Last Night in Basketball — a strong margin, one of the 10 highest in the league. Since adding Jimmy, though, that margin has skyrocketed to a whopping plus-10.8 possessions per game.

Tilt the table like that, and you’re going to win a lot of games … especially when you get No. 30 going. Which, of course, is the most important element of the infusion of Butler into the Warriors’ bloodstream.

After averaging 23 points on .567 true shooting over his previous 20 games, seeming to wear down under the weight of constant double- and triple-teams without anybody to ease his burden, Curry has averaged 29.5 points on scorching .691 TS% since the trade, looking for all the world like a rejuvenated monster. (The man is dunking, for goodness sake.)

“He was dying to be back in the mix,” Kerr recently told reporters. “Now we’re back in the mix. He’s energized by that.”

Yes, we’re still early in the Jimmy era — still beholden to small-sample-size caveats, and to reminders that the Warriors’ best post-trade wins have come against opponents missing some of their most important players (the Bucks without Giannis, the Rockets without Fred VanVleet, the Mavericks without centers). Still: The early returns have been stellar, and with the Warriors having now vaulted up to sixth place with one of the easiest remaining schedules in the West, multiple projection systems now give them about a coin-flip chance of escaping the play-in.

They wouldn’t fear a Round 1 matchup with the likes of Memphis or Houston. Get a win under your belt and find yourself in a styles-make-fights second-round clash with a favorite — a Nuggets team that can look wobbly beneath Jokić, a Lakers team still figuring itself out post-Luka trade, the dominant but young Thunder — and who knows what can happen?

This is all Curry’s been asking for: a real chance, a shot at relevance late in the season. To play meaningful basketball in spring; to have a reason to believe.

“I want to win. I want to be competitive,” Curry told Murdock earlier this season. “Doesn’t mean you’re going to be the odds-on favorite to win a championship; you just want to have a situation where you can be in the conversation. That’s what we all want. It’s what we all deserve.”

And it’s what they’re trending toward getting. Jimmy Butler might be a good fit anywhere; he’s a great fit, though, for a team that needed a reason to believe.