One Bad Landing, and Everything Changes

The Warriors Won. It Didn’t Matter.

There’s a game tonight between the Golden State Warriors and the Toronto Raptors, but minds are on Jimmy Butler. Done for the season. Damn.

Word is he’s out for the season (at least), and the Warriors don’t know what to do next more than any of the rest of us. Al Horford will rest on the back-to-back per standard old man practice; Draymond Green, Gui Santos and Will Richard are all listed as questionable.

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GAME DETAILS

WHO: Golden State Warriors (25-19) vs Toronto Raptors (25-19)

WHEN: Tuesday, January 20th, 2026; 7pm

WATCH: NBCSBA

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Warriors dominate Heat, but Jimmy Butler's ACL tear puts everything in jeopardy

I couldn’t really sleep last night. I made the stupid decision of checking my phone one last time around midnight, just in time for the Shams notification to come through. I wasn’t surprised – I had managed to maybe talk myself into disbelieving my lying eyes, that what had clearly happened wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed. Pure delusion. I thought about Jimmy joking as he went off the court, laughing and telling Buddy Hield to “shut [his] bitch ass up” as he laid on the ground writhing in pain, asking the ref for free throws as he was half-carried to the tunnel. With some healthy denial, I was ready to go to sleep with just the faintest hint of suppressed distress in the back of my head. Thanks to Shams burning the midnight oil, I had a bright red panic alarm going off the moment before I tucked myself in on a work night.

Being a sports fan means you’re putting your satisfaction with your hobby in the hands of random chance. You don’t know when you’re going to suddenly break out and start contending. I didn’t do anything to earn 2015, it was just a thing that happened to me thanks to the efforts of hundreds of people I’ve never met. You don’t know when that all comes crashing down. I didn’t do anything to cause the injury-riddled 2019-20 season – that was all just two plays, one awkward landing from Klay Thompson and Aron Baynes falling onto Steph’s hand. That same role of the die came up favorably two seasons later, when Klay had recovered and Steph peaked and somehow Otto Porter Jr. put together the only healthy season of his career.

Steph is constantly flinging himself through the paint for layups – he misplaces one foot on one of those plays in 2014 and none of this ever happens. But he didn’t, and it did happen. Chance has been good to the Warriors.

When chance turns, it gets ugly. As I lay awake, I thought about all the plays that led up to it, the cascading butterfly effect that caused Jimmy Butler to come down on one foot. Some of it wasn’t rational – I had the stray thought about how they should have rested him, as if Rick Celebrini was supposed to have a Final Destination premonition about him coming down awkwardly on one play in the third quarter. A popular theory on Twitter has been that the entry pass was somehow bad, if Podziemski had simply given him a simple bounce pass none of this would have happened.

Classic bargaining, looking for someone to blame or some logic in the suffering. The first piece of on-court chatter I can remember from Jimmy Butler in his first game with the Warriors, two weeks shy of one year ago, was him being frustrated with one of those bounce passes and telling Draymond that if he threw the ball up, he’d go up and get it. It was a strategy that worked up until the exact moment it didn’t. It’s good basketball. Sometimes good basketball means you tear your ACL and there’s nothing you could have done differently.

Jimmy Butler has been transformative for this franchise (I have to stop myself from referring to him in the past tense, as if he was dead instead of looking at a year of doing physical therapy in his beautiful mansion.) In the post-2022 era, the Warriors had taken consistent steps back every year, languished in mediocrity, losing in the play-in, losing their joy. The Warriors were in a horrible vibes spiral when they added Jimmy last February.

Almost single-handedly, Jimmy revived the fight of the franchise – with Steph reengaged from having a sidekick, the Warriors built a team that made sense off of his playmaking and driving. His comedy routine with Buddy Hield put some life into a franchise that was getting depressing to follow. He took it upon himself to mentor Kuminga through his struggles and his contract dispute. Commentators were worried about his personality fit with the Warriors, but by all accounts I’ve never heard a single bad word about him from anyone remotely associated with the franchise. The marriage was a striking success.

This year, Butler was having one of the best seasons of his career by advanced stats: the Warriors somehow had a +15 net rating when he was the only star on the court. EPM had him as the 13th most valuable player in the league. Basketball Reference’s Win Shares have him as the third most valuable player in the league, well ahead of Steph. Jimmy Butler was showing no visible signs of decline: just excellence, consistency, and professionalism. All of that mattered for this franchise. But one bad landing in what turned out to be a blowout victory, and it’s all dust.

As I laid awake sometime in the early morning hours, the overriding feeling I had was a sense of injustice. Between Steph’s hamstring last season and now this, we never got to see what the Steph/Jimmy combo really looks like when the chips are down. We probably never will. Maybe that’s the median outcome when you’re depending on two of the oldest players in the league. But they were so good and it worked so well and it’s gone for at least a year. Jimmy Butler will be age 37 when he comes back, the oldest returnee from an ACL tear in league history. It’s easy and almost satisfying to just wallow in that. Maybe one day I’ll be telling my kids about what could have been with that Jimmy Butler/Steph Curry team, that last gasp of a dynasty that was snuffed out just a little too soon.

A great era of basketball is probably over just under a year after it started. It’s heartbreaking. My heart is broken.

Once I got over that sense of injustice sometime around 4 AM, I started thinking about what going forward looks like. Actually, that’s a lie – to my shame, I was thinking about that the moment he went down. I can’t turn that part of me off. Someone’s career is in jeopardy and as he’s being carried off the court, I thought, “wait, what does this mean for the trade deadline?” I don’t think I’m unique in that, but it’s a sociopathic impulse you get from the distance between you and these athletes. Jimmy Butler is seeing career mortality approach, Buddy Hield is worried for his friend, I’m trying to stop myself from booting up the trade machine on my phone.

Earlier in the game I was idly posting about maybe trading back for Andrew Wiggins. Now, all those moves around the edges, the Jonathan Kuminga-for-role-player trades, that’s all out the window and the stakes are existential for the Warriors’ front office. They can grieve (again, he’s got a sports injury, he’s still around) but the clock that was ticking down on the greatest player in franchise history’s career is still ticking down. That doesn’t necessarily mean drastic movement, but that means decisiveness. Maybe the Warriors think the season is doomed no matter what they do. Okay, but that needs to be dealt with decisively. Maybe they see a way to salvage the situation. Great. Do it decisively.

That could mean that Jimmy Butler III might not be on the team, even in a technical sense, in two weeks. It feels horrible. But just ask De’Anthony Melton – once you’re not able to play, you’re dead weight on a contract that can be moved. The realities of the salary cap lead to some pretty coldblooded incentives, and everyone knows it. It’s brutal and unfair, just like the injury.

I want to finish by expressing my deep admiration for how the team handled the injury in the moment. I’m sure all the players had these exact feelings – the denial, the bargaining, the planning the next move. The extent of the injury wasn’t surprising, it wasn’t like Melton’s ACL tear last year where it happened under the radar. Everyone knew the moment he collapsed what had happened, spectators and players alike. The only difference is that Jimmy Butler is just a figure on my TV to me, and he is a friend, mentor, leader – a person – to the players. They could have shut off, gone through the motions.

But I always admire the ability of athletes to compartmentalize, to leave all distractions behind when they enter a game, the short memory that lets you still take a shot when you’re 0 for 9. The players carried Jimmy to the locker room and then forgot about it and compartmentalized. Nothing to be done about that now. Just go out and win and deal with it later.

In the fourth quarter, with Steph resting, Jimmy in the locker room, De’Anthony Melton and Draymond Green resting for the game – probably their four best players off the court – the Warriors put together an intense 15-0 run to put the game away and turn it into a blow out. Brandin Podziemski took some stray trash talk personally and turned into a Steph approximation, pulling up for threes over and over, driving for floaters. This was the best game of his season by far, one of the best games I’ve ever seen him play.

Quinten Post pulled out of his slump to start knocking down shots and battling for rebounds with Bam Adebayo. Will Richard continued to impress with his ball-hawk skills and limitless confidence. Even Buddy Hield clawed his way back into the rotation and put the team on his back for a time. The actual game the Warriors played could have been an afterthought to the nightmare that had just taken place, but instead they dominated.

If there’s any hope for this season, it will be in the young players playing like this all the time. The supporting cast has been hot and cold this season, but they’re playing excellent basketball right now, Jimmy Butler or no. They need to take a leap and pick up the slack from an absent superstar. This is probably an impossible ask, which we know because we asked it last year and, for all their effort, they couldn’t deliver. But this is where we’re at.

I’m sleep-deprived and sad. I don’t know what’s next for this franchise. I do have faith that this group is full of enough competitiveness and grit to not give up out of despair, and that’s all you can ask for right now in the immediate wake. The Warriors have won 12 of their last 16 and were finally putting things together. Now that’s shattered on the floor. Put the pieces together as best you can.