Jimmy Butler’s Injury Thrusts Steve Kerr And Jonathan Kuminga Once More Into The Hell Of Working Together

Jimmy Butler's season is over. His painful-looking collapse in the third quarter of Golden State's win Monday night over the visiting Miami Heat was caused by the sudden kerplosion of his right ACL, a crisis that will require surgery and then many months of recovery. This stinks for Butler, who is now facing the most serious injury of his career during his age-36 season. Butler delivers and takes beatings, a consequence of his particular style of basketball, which aesthetically certainly is not for everyone. You have to grade durability on a curve: LaMelo Ball will miss 15 to 40 games per campaign due to having papier-maché ankles; Butler, meanwhile, played a solid majority of his team's games every season for 13 years despite deploying his own tender body every night as a bulldozer, a forklift, a wrecking ball, an excavator, a railway stopblock, and a grenade. That he made it this long without any ligaments shredding catastrophically should be a real point of pride.

Lately he'd been cooking pretty good, and the Warriors had won 12 of 16 games to climb up to eighth in the Western Conference, a season-best six games over .500. Even with Butler, the Warriors are desperately cramped for offensive space and reliable shot-creation. Of the players who have played at least half of Golden State's games this season, only Butler and Stephen Curry have posted usage rates over 20 percent, which does not seem like it should be possible and in any case cannot have been sustainable, not when those two players have a combined age of 73 years old. The next most engaged Warriors regular by usage, after Butler, is veteran DeAnthony Melton, who is working his way into form after missing the first month of the season while recovering from his own ACL injury; the next most engaged guy is reserve guard Pat Spencer, who despite Steve Kerr's sweaty insistence to the contrary is 100 percent not "that motherfucker." Across Golden State's last 11 games Spencer has scored a grand total of three points.

It would sure be a luxury if the Warriors had another talented scorer in reserve, preferably someone with the floor skills and in-between game to handle some of Butler's bruising creation duties, and the size to hold up at all when assigned to defend opposing swingmen. Unfortunately, such players nowadays cannot be had for less than, say, $22.5 million per season, an expenditure that would push a team with Golden State's other salary commitments deep into the luxury tax. Obviously you cannot expect the Warriors—a tax-repeater, and thus subject to an onerous tax multiplier— to have splurged on such a thing, and thus to now be on the hook for an estimated tax bill for this season of more than $81 million. Obviously, had they made such a bold commitment, the player would already be in Kerr's rotation, spelling Butler, absorbing an important share of the offense, and pushing washed-up bozo Buddy Hield to the very end of the bench. Especially if that player were just 23 years old, in good health, had cost the team a valuable lottery pick, and had averaged 21 points per game across the team's most recent playoff series. Frankly, I don't even know why we are still talking about this!