Heat preparing for all scenarios with Jimmy Butler (ankle) questionable for Game 2
Erik Spoelstra looks tired. Pink eyes, body hunched.
It’s less than 24 hours after his Miami Heat stole Game 1 at Madison Square Garden with a 108-101 victory over the Knicks on Sunday. Forty-three minutes into the victory, Spoelstra’s best player, Jimmy Butler, came up limping after turning his ankle on a drive to the rim.
Butler played through the pain, limping up and down the court in intermittent spurts. The limp grew more significant in the locker room postgame, and by the time the star forward began to get dressed, his ankle had swollen to the size of a baseball. His teammate, Kyle Lowry, joked Butler went down with the injury as if he’d been shot.
The Heat star responded as a trainer taped his ankle: He hadn’t turned it this bad in quite some time.
Butler’s status remains uncertain for Game 2, a must-win for a Knicks team that wants to retain some semblance of home-court advantage this series, and make no mistake: he is the engine that gives the eighth-seeded Heat a fighting chance in pursuit of their second NBA Finals appearance since the 2020 season in the Orlando Bubble.
The Heat are now preparing for at least four different scenarios: Knicks star Julius Randle missed Game 1 with a sprained left ankle and is a game-time decision for Game 2, just like Butler.
Spoelstra and his coaching staff are prepping their roster to play Tuesday at The Garden both with and without Butler, and they’re also preparing for the Knicks both to play with and without Randle.
It means a lot less sleep given the significance of the variables at play with both teams’ star players questionable for the next game. Then again, it’s the playoffs: What is sleep?
“It would be irresponsible not to prepare for all the different scenarios,” Spoelstra said on Monday on the third floor of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in the city’s NoMad district. Asked about sleep, the Heat coach laughed: “It’s not like it’s a competition with who can sleep less with the coaching staff on the other side. It’s the playoffs.”
Spoelstra has answered a different version of the same question every month for the last half-year. How will the Heat defy the odds when one of their top players is out due to injury?
Butler appeared in only 64 of Miami’s 82 possible regular-season games this season, missing 18 due to injury. Lowry sat five straight weeks with left knee soreness through the midseason All-Star break. Victor Oladipo only played in 42 regular-season games, then his season ended in the first round with a freak knee injury in Game 5 against the Milwaukee Bucks. Former Sixth Man of the Year Tyler Herro’s season also may have ended in the first round when he broke his hand diving on the floor for a loose ball in Game 1 in Milwaukee.
Herro, the team’s third-leading scorer at 20 points per game this season, could return if Miami makes it as far as the NBA Finals. The team is moving forward as if he’s unavailable unless they get information suggesting he could return sooner.
“It certainly feels like the norm for our basketball team,” Spoelstra said. “Whether it’s better or worse, we’ve been able to compartmentalize and and have people step up.”
Butler’s situation is a little different. His ankle isn’t broken, only swollen, and he’s become the modern-day NBA poster child for playing through injury, particularly when the stakes raise in the playoffs.
The uncertainty of Butler’s availability for Game 2 renders the team helpless. They have no choice but to prepare for both scenarios: Jimmy hurt, or Jimmy active.
“Knowing Jimmy, he might mess around and try to play or whatever — or not play,” said forward Caleb Martin. “We don’t know yet. So we’ll see what type of state he’s in with that ankle but we’ll be ready. We’ll prep for both I’m sure.”
If Butler can’t go, players like Martin, like Lowry, like sharpshooter and three-and-D wing Max Strus will see their roles drastically change. Butler’s brilliance is on both ends of the floor: He routinely defends the opposing team’s best player, then also sets the table offensively for his teammates.
“It’s obviously a lot different. He’s a core piece to us offensively and defensively, so that’s obviously a prep that’s gonna be very important for us,” Martin continued. “Guys are gonna have to step up, which we know we’ve been known to do. We’ve had games without Jimmy before, and obviously it is a little bit of a different prep, but he involves everybody so much that we should be able to handle ourselves with or without him. So we’re gonna do our best and see what that looks like.”
There’s also a chance that Butler gives it a go, and still plays limited, like he did down the stretch of Game 1 on Saturday. Miami’s star forward is one of the toughest players in all of basketball and showed it by gutting through the final moments of the game without making himself a liability on either end of the floor.
If he has to, he’ll do it again on Tuesday with a chance at a trip to the Eastern Conference Finals hanging in the balance.
“That certainly was inspiring that he would not come out of the game and be able to finish the game,” Spoelstra said postgame on Sunday. “It just infused a bunch of confidence to the rest of the guys that we have to finish this off.”
“You’ve got an irreplaceable guy, an unreplaceable guy like Jimmy?” Lowry added. “If he goes, he goes. If he’s not, shoot, we’ve got to find a way to just go out there and do our jobs still. We’ve still got to go hoop.”
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