Jimmy Butler's Game Ready to Explode to New Heights After Signing Max Contract
Jimmy Butler is the proud new owner of a five-year, $90 million max contract from the Chicago Bulls.
It's a deal he earned with an incredible season, showing huge improvement as an offensive player, making his first All-Star team and winning the league's Most Improved Player Award. He managed all this less than a 12 months after betting on his own improvement by turning down a four-year, $44 million contract extension from Chicago at the beginning of last season.
With his future as a Bull secure, Butler looks ready to take another big leap toward superstardom.
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Butler first carved out a niche for himself in the NBA as a powerful wing defender. Four years into his career, that hasn't really changed. He routinely guards the opponent's best perimeter player and has continued to be among the most effective and hard-working defensive players in the league.
His new contract and the accolades he earned last season are a product of his offensive evolution. For the first time, he looked like a legitimate two-way star and not just a very good 3-and-D wing.
Last year, Butler set new career highs in points, rebounds, assists, made three-pointers and free throws attempted per game. His true shooting percentage, assist percentage and turnover percentage were also the best of his career, coming with a usage percentage of 21.6 percent—up from his previous career high of 16.8. The change in his statistical performance in just one season is staggering. It could be an indication of what's to come.
| PTS/G | REB/G | AST/G | 3PM/G | FTA/G | TS% | AST% | TO% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | 13.1 | 4.9 | 2.6 | 1.0 | 4.7 | 52.2% | 11.1% | 10.8% |
| 2014-15 | 20.0 | 5.8 | 3.3 | 1.1 | 6.6 | 58.3% | 14.4% | 7.7% |
As the rest of the team worked through injuries and struggled to find a rhythm with new pieces such as Pau Gasol and Nikola Mirotic, Butler shouldered an enormous offensive load with far greater efficiency than he had ever mustered before. This is an incredibly rare leap for a young player—especially one asked to do as much on defense as Butler is.
One easy way to see his offensive development is to compare his shot charts from the past two seasons. Here is his shot chart for the 2013-14 season:
Here is how things looked last year:
The most dramatic changes in efficiency occurred around the rim and from behind the three-point line. In 2013-14, Butler was only an above-average three-point shooter from the corners. Last year, he extended that accuracy to the wings and above the break. He also became a much more proficient finisher around the rim.
It was the balance in improvement between those two things—hitting from the outside and attacking the paint—that really spurred Butler's surprising leap. We can see this on a slightly more detailed level if we look at his numbers from the NBA's SportVU player-tracking statistics, focusing on drives and catch-and-shoot three-pointers.
| Drives per 36 | Team Points per Drive | Catch-and-Shoot 3PT% | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | 2.8 | 1.20 | 30.7% |
| 2014-15 | 4.8 | 1.24 | 39.5% |
For the first time, Butler expanded beyond the complementary skill set he had shown to that point. He worked off the ball as a deadly outside threat. He worked on the ball as a punishing dribble-drive threat, able to get into the teeth of the defense while making things happen for himself and his teammates.
Yet for as far as he's come, there are still several ways Butler could take his game to another level.
One of the biggest potential factors in Butler's continued growth is the Chicago offense. Even with the addition of the talented Gasol and a mostly healthy Derrick Rose, Chicago's offense too often stagnated last season. Tom Thibodeau's reliance on big lineups often meant the pace was slow and spacing was hard to come by, creating a challenging dynamic.
The graph below is a representation of four elements of offensive style—pace, ball movement, player movement and shot selection. The Bulls are highlighted in red with the rest of the league grayed out behind them.
You can see that Chicago's offense featured plenty of movement but played at a relatively slow pace and didn't do much to leverage all that movement into an efficient distribution of open and high-value shots. There is no right formula for offensive efficiency, and this system did work relatively well for the Bulls. They ranked 10th in offensive efficiency, scoring 104.7 points per 100 possessions, according to NBA.com. Still, it often looked like this talented group was capable of much more.
New head coach Fred Hoiberg will certainly be making some fundamental changes to the team's offense next season. While praising Thibodeau, he has also hinted at some of the things he would like to differently, telling the Associated Press (h/t the New York Post):
"I love this roster. I absolutely love this roster. I love the versatility of the players, the different lineups that we’re going to be able to play. You can play small, you can play big. You’ve got lineups that I think can really get out and play with pace. You’ve got a great group of veteran players that know how to play.
I think Tom Thibodeau is an excellent, excellent basketball coach, and I think he instilled a lot of unbelievable qualities in this team that hopefully I can build on.
"
The two new elements there are really pace and lineup versatility. Both will be of tremendous value to Butler. Thibodeau's commitment to defense and his veterans meant the Bulls almost always played with two of their three key big men—Gasol, Joakim Noah and Taj Gibson—on the floor. This meant the floor-spacing Mirotic was often used out of position at small forward when he was able to get on the floor.
These big lineups squeezed Chicago's offensive spacing, which made both open jump shots and driving lanes harder to find. As an example of how space could change his game, Butler played just 225 minutes with Mirotic at power forward and Mike Dunleavy, another excellent outside shooter, at small forward. In those minutes, according to NBAwowy, Butler made 50 percent of his three-point attempts and drew 9.1 free-throw attempts per 36 minutes, both a notch above his impressive numbers for the entire season.
If Hoiberg is serious about playing smaller on a more regular basis, more shooting and more spacing on the floor should only make things easier for Butler.
The other key is pace. It seems like every new coach talks about pushing the pace in their introductory press conference, but for Hoiberg, it's in his coaching DNA. The same can not be said for Thibodeau.
Analysis by the Hungarian Jordan at Blog a Bull found that Hoiberg's college teams ranked in the top 40 in pace in four of his five seasons. "Hoiberg is going to have the complete opposite approach to coaching this team," they noted. "His teams fly up the court, getting into their first action very early in the clock and looking decisively for good passes."
On average, shots early in the shot clock tend to be more efficient, as they come before the defense has a chance to get set. Butler saw relatively few of those opportunities in Thibodeau's grinding offense.
The table below shows Butler's shot distribution separated by the time remaining on the shot clock when the field goal was attempted. You can also see how that compares to a few other talented young shooting guards.
Compared to this group, Butler saw the lowest percentage of his shot attempts coming early in the shot clock. He also had, by a wide margin, the highest percent of his shot attempts coming at the end of the shot clock— a time when the defense normally has the advantage.
A more uptempo offensive system should mean more easy shots for Butler.
Before agreeing to re-sign with the Bulls, Butler shared his perspective on Hoiberg with Seerat Sohi of Rolling Stone:
"I talked to Hoiberg. He's a really good coach. He knows what he's doing. He has some great offensive schemes and a great coaching staff. I think he's gonna be good for the Bulls. I think Chicago will like him. He's a very likeable guy, very successful at the college level and hopefully he can bring it to the Bulls.
"
Although he was noncommittal, (having neither made nor shared his contract decision at that point), you can see he was aware of the ways in which Hoiberg can help expand his game.
There is always the concern a player will slump after earning a big day—a slide in energy and intensity after working so hard to maximize their earning potential. Butler is a player who has scrapped and clawed for every bit of NBA success, and it's hard to imagine this enormous contract will push his mentality toward passivity.
Jimmy Butler's story is not about anything except survival and perseverance.
Bringing back his intensity, defensive acumen and burgeoning offensive game to a new system set up to make his offensive opportunities even easier and maximize his talents, Butler could just be getting started.
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