MILWAUKEE — Miami Fever coach Erik Spoelstra delivered a message to his team after another suspension for the star striker Jimmy Butlerwho will miss the upcoming two-match tour Milwaukee AND Brooklyn as punishment for missing the team’s flight.
“I wanted to tell our team to get used to it,” Spoelstra said after Thursday morning’s shooting. “Deal with it. That’s life in the NBA; this is the life we chose. If you think it will be predictable, you are very wrong.”
Heat officials suspended Butler on Wednesday for his “continued disregard for team rules, insubordinate conduct and conduct detrimental to the team, including the team’s failure to fly to Milwaukee on Wednesday,” the team said in a statement, the latest in the ongoing saga between the Heat and their disgruntled star.
Before Spoelstra’s media session began, a Heat public relations official informed reporters that he would not answer questions about Butler, a policy they practiced for several weeks during the initial suspension.
Butler just returned last Friday from a seven-game suspension for “repeated conduct detrimental to the team.” He appeared in three games, averaging 13.0 points in 29.3 minutes, before receiving a suspension for the final two games, causing the Heat to prepare for Thursday’s game without him in Milwaukee.
“It requires fortitude and commitment to the task at hand,” Spoelstra said. “Nothing changes when it comes to the task before us. We have a game tonight, we have enough continuity, we know what our identity is at this point. You can make up any excuse you want, but we get to do what we love.
It’s happened to us all season long, so we know the drills and we know what we need to do to make those adjustments.”
ESPN’s Shams Charania has been reporting that Butler has been wanting to be traded since last month, and on Friday, sources told ESPN the Heat are looking to find a deal that meets Butler’s wishes.
The NBA trade deadline is February 6.
When asked about the Butler saga, Heat Guard Tyler Herro he said: “We all know everything that’s going on. There’s nothing to talk about.”
“It’s probably not the easiest thing to work with someone who’s going to show up to every job,” Herro said Thursday morning. “We love Jimmy and would love for him to be here. I love Jimmy.”
