Longtime Miami Heat team president Pat Riley has weighed in on the recent monthslong speculation regarding a potential trade of the team's best player, six-time All-Star swingman Jimmy Butler, via an official statement on the team's social media accounts.
Statement from Pat Riley
"We usually don't comment on rumors, but all this speculation has become a distraction to the team and is not fair to the players and coaches. Therefore, we will make it clear - We are not trading Jimmy Butler."
"We usually don't comment on rumors, but all this speculation has become a distraction to the team and is not fair to the players and coaches," Riley writes. "Therefore, we will make it clear - We are not trading Jimmy Butler."
The 6-foot-7 small forward has been a huge part of Miami's recent success. The first year he joined the Heat, in 2019-20, he and fellow All-Star Bam Adebayo led the club to the NBA Finals for the first time in 2014, where Miami fell to LeBron James — the man who had guided Miami to those 2014 Finals — and the Los Angeles Lakers in six games.
In 2022, the revamped Heat pushed the Boston Celtics to seven games in the Eastern Conference Finals. A heartbreaking missed Butler jumper at the buzzer cost Miami a possible return trip to the Finals, where they would have faced an aging Golden State Warriors squad. The next year, the eighth-seeded Heat improbably made another run to the Finals, where they fell in five contests to three-time MVP center Nikola Jokic's Denver Nuggets.
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