With Miami’s longshot bid for championship glory, at long last, on the brink of elimination, it’s time to address something that’s been nagging at me the entire playoffs: How, exactly, do we describe Jimmy Butler’s place in NBA history?

I feel like, 20 years from now, we’re going to try explaining Butler to the next generation, completely lack the ability to define what made him great and end up stammering gibberish about fourth-quarter eruptions and overpriced coffee. We’ll be like the warlock Tim trying to explain to Monty Python’s grail-seekers the dangers of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog. “He can leap about … Look at the bones!”

Butler is a visceral, dominant force in nearly every playoff game in which he participates, particularly in the final minutes. Yet when you try to list his tangible accomplishments in 280 characters, it gets harder to build a concise, compelling case for his place in the pantheon. This season was a perfect example: He had the best year of his career but didn’t make the All-Star team and finished 22nd in scoring.

In fact, there is no cognitive dissonance quite like looking at Butler’s Basketball-Reference.com page. He hasn’t led the league in any important category except steals, just once. He has never made first-team All-NBA or really come close; his second-team finish this year is the best he’s ever done.

He has never finished higher than 10th in MVP voting and has received only one, single top-three MVP vote, lifetime, out of the hundred ballots cast every year. Until he won the Larry Bird Trophy for Eastern Conference Finals MVP this season, Butler’s most notable “black ink” accomplishment was winning Eastern Conference Player of the Month in November 2014.

Jimmy’s confidence never wavered. ECF MVP. pic.twitter.com/5bTfJ7NNvh

— Miami HEAT (@MiamiHEAT) May 30, 2023

It goes on: He has only once played more than 70 games in a season. He has only once shot better than 50 percent from the field. He has never made a 3-pointer. (OK, I exaggerate … slightly.)

And yet, every spring Butler demonstrates that he is quite clearly one of the best players in the league. He has been a massive protagonist in four of the last five postseasons, and we might view him much differently if he hadn’t come up on the wrong end of two all-time almost-famous moments.

As a Sixer, Butler produced the coast-to-coast slalom that tied Game 7 in Toronto in 2019, setting the stage for Kawhi Leonard’s legendary four-bouncer at the buzzer. A year ago, it was Butler’s pull-up from 3 that went just awry to allow Boston to survive as East champions.

Fittingly, Butler was robbed of a historic moment again this year. His three free throws put Miami ahead in Game 6 against Boston, the culmination of a dominating stretch run in which he scored 13 points in the final four minutes and led Miami from 10 down to take a lead with 3.0 seconds left. It would have been the exclamation point to a heroic postseason run, one that would have dragged the eighth-seeded Heat to a Cinderella appearance in the NBA Finals … until Derrick White’s game-winning tip-in at the buzzer made it for naught. Yes, Miami still won in seven, but the narrative flipped to Jayson Tatum’s ankle and the Celtics’ assorted imperfections.

This could end up important when it comes to history’s viewpoint of Butler. He has never won a championship and has accumulated limited regular-season accolades, factors that could hurt him when it comes to things like Hall of Fame selection and placement on the top-100-or-whatever of all-time lists. That Miami will possibly end this year with the difficult feat of losing seven times in nine games doesn’t help either; only the 1994 Utah Jazz have closed a postseason with a 2-7 kick. (Usually, teams are eliminated long before they can complete a seven-losses-in-nine-games run.)

It’s especially important if Butler doesn’t get another chance to play this late into spring. He’s 33, started late as a four-year college player and missed chunks of time in the middle; he’s never going to amass the type of counting stats that blow people away. Many inferior players — players who would have no hope of holding their own against Giannis Antetokounmpo or Tatum in a playoff series — will likely end up with more All-Star bids and All-NBA selections, especially after Butler was bizarrely excluded from two of the last three East All-Star rosters.

On the other hand, Playoff Jimmy is a different story entirely. Maybe not quite on the level of Playoff Murray, but not too far off either. Butler has been an excellent but underrated regular-season performer and built up a pretty strong career resume just off that. But it’s his ability to level up in the playoffs that has been particularly notable.

For instance, he’s raised his PER in the playoffs from the regular season in four of his last five seasons, with the lone exception being when Antetokounmpo and the Bucks swallowed him up in the 2021 first round. This is a rare feat, actually: Nearly all players, even great ones, see their production numbers decline in the playoffs due to the much greater competition level. For many, it’s a steep dive.

Butler first gained notoriety in this regard in the 2020 postseason when he improbably led a fifth-seeded Miami team to the finals. That was impressive in its own right — Butler was sixth in PER among players with at least 300 playoff minutes and eighth in BPM — but he also saved his best for the most important moments. Even as the Heat lost the finals to the Lakers in six games, Butler averaged a near triple-double (26.2-8.3-9.8) on 65.8 percent true shooting.

The last two seasons, however, have gone to another level. While the top-seeded Heat fell to Boston in seven games in 2022, Butler was the best playoff performer in the league, something that doesn’t quite get the attention it should. (Butler should have won the Bird Trophy last year too, by the way.)

Look, Steph Curry was great and all, but Jimmy was Jimmy. In addition to his usual elite defense, he finished first among all players with at least 300 minutes in PER (29.9) and BPM (11.8), ranking ahead of Luka (Dončić), Giannis, Steph and everyone else. (Nikola Jokić only played in five playoff games last year. He would have topped Butler in PER but not BPM.)

Butler had four 40-point games in the 2022 postseason … four more than he had the entire regular season. Overall, he raised his regular-season scoring average by a whopping six points per game in the 2022 playoffs, from 21.4 to 27.4, while at the same time slashing his turnover rate, increasing his shooting percentage and doubling his minuscule 3-point rate while also actually making some of them.

Fast forward to 2023, and he’s done it again. Butler blew up most extravagantly in the Heat’s Game 4 first-round win in Milwaukee, a 56-point supernova that included 19 points in the last six minutes and brought the Heat back from a 12-point deficit. This doesn’t technically count in his playoff stats, but Butler also scored 13 points in the last seven minutes in the Play-In game against the Bulls to lead Miami to a comeback win.

He hasn’t been quite as superb in the final two playoff rounds, perhaps an after-effect from the ankle sprain that kept him out of Game 2 of the New York series. He’s still had his moments though, notably a 35-point outburst that allowed Miami to come back and steal Game 1 in Boston and, of course, his ultimately-in-vain heroics at the end of Game 6.

Nevertheless, even in a “quiet” series against Denver, he’s still humming along at a fairly elite level — he had 28 points, seven rebounds and six assists in the Game 7 clincher in Beantown, and even more recently had a 25-7-7- line in Game 4 of the finals. Bigger picture, this was the third time in four years he’s faced off against Tatum in the Eastern Conference finals, and if you watched all three series, you’d have a hard time saying Tatum was the better player.

Fittingly, Butler’s postseason stats again exceed those of a great many players with more exalted reputations, including 23 of the 24 players who played in the All-Star Game he wasn’t invited to. Entering Game 7 against Boston, he ranked third in playoff PER, behind only Jokić and the briefly scorching Devin Booker, and sixth in BPM. Once again he’s raised his scoring average by several points a game (from 22.9 to 27.3) from regular season to postseason, and once again he’s doubled his rate of 3-point attempts in the playoffs.

Will he get another shot at this? Even accounting for Butler’s postseason heroics, it’s not clear. In addition to Butler’s age, Miami finished the regular season seventh in the East with a negative point differential for a reason; questions linger up and down the roster. The Heat may lose two key starters in free agency and already stand at the increasingly punitive “second apron” of luxury tax in the new CBA.

So let’s acknowledge Butler’s legacy while we’re in the moment and understand how much a crib sheet of his accomplishments shortchanges him as a player. Some doofus 20 years from now is going to look at his All-Star games, All-NBA nods and counting stats and think he was just some nice player on par with Joe Johnson or Dave Bing.

The truth is that Jimmy Butler is among the very best players of his time, an automatic Hall of Famer and, at the very least, one of the 100 best to ever play this game. This feels like a good time to tip our hat to perhaps the most underrated player of this era.

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(Top photo: Megan Briggs / Getty Images)