The 2025 NBA trade deadline is just over a week away, and just about every team in the league is looking to play some kind of angle.
For a handful of upper-crust squads, it’s about trying to find the last piece of the championship puzzle. For plenty more, it’s about attempting to separate yourself from the pack and make a postseason push in a congested conference where a handful of wins separates home-court advantage from a lottery spot. For the rest, it’s about continuing a rebuilding project by trying to snag a second-round pick or two on the fringes of bigger deals … or, if nothing else, looking to duck the luxury tax and save your owner a few million bucks.
Whatever game they’re playing, front offices across the NBA are working overtime trying to find the help they want at the price they need. Let’s take a look at the five most interesting teams — to me! — in the NBA as we approach the deadline, starting with the broiling beef on the shores of Biscayne Bay:
Miami Heat
I mean, duh.
Jimmy Butler is the best actually-gettable player on the market right now. Jimmy Butler has also spent most of the last two months gleefully lighting Roman candles inside Kaseya Center — I’m speaking strictly in metaphor, unless there’s been a new development since I started writing this sentence — in hopes of forcing his way out of town and landing in a new home where he can rediscover his joy for playing basketball … and, hey, also, just while we’re at it, maybe discover a new max contract to carry him through his late 30s. They bury treasure in the desert, don’t they?
“I think I’m still in my prime, if I’m being brutally honest,” Butler told Ben Golliver of The Washington Post last month.
Everything’s come to a head in recent weeks: reports of longstanding issues surrounding Butler’s star treatment — skipping shootarounds, traveling privately rather than with the team charter, staying on his own in separate hotels — boiling over; suggestions that Butler’s felt burned by the front office parting ways with multiple partners (Max Strus, Gabe Vincent, Caleb Martin, Kyle Lowry) from those deep Miami playoff runs without surrounding him with commensurate competitors; Butler playing at something considerably below his customary level of intensity when he did take the court for Erik Spoelstra’s club; a game of chicken between two of the most obstinate people in the NBA, in Butler and Heat president Pat Riley.
The result: an “ugly, bitter, untenable” situation that has seen the Heat suspend Butler three separate times this month, costing the six-time All-Star more than $3 million in missed game checks — though, for what it’s worth, Butler can likely recoup at least some portion of his fines and docked wages via union intervention and negotiation, as Ben Simmons did a couple of years back — and signaling an unceremonious end to what had been a pretty fruitful partnership for the last half-decade.
Actually arriving at that endpoint, though, has proven tricky, thanks to the remarkably complicated reality of Fitting Jimmy Butler Into What You Do.
There’s the financial/structural issue: A $48.8 million salary isn’t exactly easy to slide onto your balance sheet, especially in a post-2023 collective bargaining agreement environment in which teams must deal with the penalties and restrictions that come with going over the aprons. There are the asset-management concerns; the fact that Butler holds a $52.4 million player option for 2025-26 means that, if he decides he doesn’t want to stay with your team long-term, you could wind up shipping out players and draft picks for a three-month rental, only to watch him turn around, enter unrestricted free agency and leave you with nothing.
There’s the small matter of Jimmy being 35 years old, not having played more than 65 games in a season since he was a Bull — which is eight seasons and about to be five teams ago — and toting a medical file as thick as his list of grievances with past employers. And then there’s … y’know, the part about him eventually lighting those Roman candles everywhere he goes.
Maybe none of that’s an issue for Phoenix, where the operative approach seems to be bigger, faster, louder, more; it is an issue, though, if the Heat don’t want what the Suns have to sell (namely, Bradley Beal, if a player holding the golden ticket of a no-trade clause even allows himself to go on the block). That means you’re going to need more teams involved in the process — potentially a handful, maybe even more — to both make the math work and get the Heat what they’re looking for, according to ESPN: “players who can help now, young talent, draft capital and salary that expires by the summer of 2026.”
That asking price has reportedly come down in the shadow of a third suspension, though. Brian Windhorst reported Tuesday that the Heat “are willing to do more than they were when this all started last month,” including opening the door for some teams that thought they were out of the bidding — like, say, Golden State — to get back in, and potentially snag a five-time All-NBA selection for a bargain price.
There’s also the on-court component to this for Miami, which we should probably consider at some point. Amid all the drama, the Heat are still in sixth in the East, two games out of fifth, with a near-top-10 defense, Tyler Herro playing All-Star-caliber ball, Bam Adebayo locked up as a long-term two-way cornerstone, and some intriguing pieces to build…
Yahoo Sports
