When the Golden State Warriors added Jimmy Butler at the trade deadline, it felt like a proper present for Steph Curry to at least give him a chance to play — as he termed it — meaningful basketball again. But it felt like a bit of an oversell to think one player could turn a team dancing on the lottery line into a true-blue contender.
Even when Golden State started rattling off wins immediately upon Butler’s arrival, the schedule was pretty soft. That’s not to undersell the encouraging signs we all saw right away. The defense picked up. The offensive paint pressure went up. The free throw attempts went way up. Butler connected a team that had, by its own strength-in-numbers standard, sort of lost its collective way. Stephen Curry re-flipped his superstar switch.
But it wasn’t until Butler flipped his own superstar switch — notably in the season finale against the Clippers and then again in Golden State’s play-in win over Memphis — that we got to see the true power of what has become the best duo in the NBA. Yes, even better than LeBron James and Luka Dončić, who, for all their greatness, still do a lot of similar things on the court.
Curry and Butler are bonded as lethal competitors, but from a stylistic standpoint they are everything the other one isn’t. Curry is the shooter. Butler is the driver. Curry plays a little crazy. Butler calms everything down. The complementary nature of their basketball relationship removes even the slightest bit of diminishing return from their equation.
Curry and Butler are magical together, and on Sunday they led the Warriors to 95-85 win over the Houston Rockets in Game 1 of their first-round series. Curry led the way with 31 points. We all knew Amen Thompson, perhaps a peerless defender, was going to try to make Curry’s life hell, and in the early going he did just that. Curry was rushing his first couple 3s like anyone would with a shadow following you around. But he worked himself into rhythm by getting to the basket on cuts and drives for four finishes, and then the 3s started to fall.
This one with the shot clock winding down in at the midway point of the third quarter was nuts.
That put the the Warriors up 23, and it really felt like the game was over. But it wasn’t. With just over five minutes to play in the fourth quarter, the Rockets had cut it to four with all the momentum. Then Curry did this …
Those are laughable shots. He hit another fall-away rainbow that you would be embarrassed to attempt at your local lunchtime run, but Curry chucks them up in the biggest moments of the biggest games. Butler has started calling him Batman, and he’s not wrong. Curry, at 37 years old, remains a basketball superhero.
But Butler is wrong to saddle himself with the Robin role. He’s no Robin. Not when he’s playing the way he has played since the Warriors officially clicked into playoff mode. They can say they were playing playoff hoops all the way down the stretch because of their dicey postseason prospects, but this is a different version of Butler — who has now scored 93 points over his last three games.
It’s a sort of selfless selfishness that Butler deploys when he decides to become one of the best players on the planet. He’s not doing it for the stats. Or the recognition of articles like this one. He’s not a player that seems to even want to prioritize himself, but he does it, ironically, because it’s what the team needs when it gets down to this time of year.
Fine, I’ll cut back on the connection (though that wonderfully, almost intangible element of his game is omnipresent) and start actively pursuing more traditional bucket-getting dominance. If you insist.
Butler finished with a box-score stuffing 25 points, seven rebounds, six assists and five steals. He committed just one turnover. The Warriors won his 42 minutes by 14 points. Do the math, and that’s 66 combined points on 22-of-38 shooting for Curry and Butler. Nobody else had more than 14 (Brandin Podziemski, who is awesome). In a game where scoring, for both sides, was a hellish task, that kind of efficient production from your two best guys is not something on which many teams can count.
But the Warriors can count on it. Even against a devastating defense like Houston’s, Curry and Butler are not doing unsustainable things. This is just how great they are. Both individually and, more importantly, together.
Heading into Game 2 of this series and for however long the Warriors last in these playoffs, this is a duo that nobody, realistically, seems capable of stopping.
