Jimmy Butler is going to put his team on his back once again. The Heat star reiterated his desire to lead the team through a successful playoff run.
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The Miami Heat have been stop-start like the vast majority of the Eastern Conference teams. Like every other team in the playoff picture, they have had their periods of both torrid and excellent play.
They’re currently 7th in the Conference – in a play-in game spot. A Finals team is usually expected to be better than the vicinity of a .500 record like Miami are. Covid was a factor, but their 3-game slide recently proves that they have offensive issues to handle.
One of the things that hasn’t gone so well for the team this year is their shooting. Duncan Robinson was on a whole other level last year. He’s still an elite shooter, but he isn’t lighting it up like the 3rd Splash Brother as he was last season.
But Jimmy Butler still believes in his teammates. They did, after all, stand up to his high standards through 4 gruelling playoff series in a bubble environment.
Jimmy Butler backs himself and his team to sort it out by the playoffs
As a natural leader, Butler understands when and how to goad and pressure his teammates. They’ve currently just broken a win streak, so it is imperative for him to keep their heads level. That’s the message he conveyed after the Heat won convincingly in San Antonio last night:
“I can’t speak for everybody, I don’t care, I really don’t. I don’t pay attention to it, I won’t be on the World Wide Web like that. So I can’t tell you who is where.”
“I know in our team meeting we talk about it. All we got to do is get there. We get there, us as a team, I’ll handle the rest.”
Erik Spoelstra and Bam Adebayo echoed similar sentiments to Jimmy Buckets on this occasion. The team is capable of stringing together a dominant run as they showed in the first 2 rounds of the playoffs last year.
