A man gets his hopes up, only to watch them get dashed.
A certain man — we’ll call him ‘‘me’’ — longed for former Bulls star Jimmy Butler to go to the Rockets to be paired with James Harden. It would have been a huge soap opera, even by NBA standards.
Two alpha dogs. Two players with major diva tendencies. Two guys with very definite and very different ideas about how to play basketball. This was either a peer-reviewed psychological study or a police report for felonious assault waiting to be written.
How long before Butler would tire of Harden’s robber-baron ball-hogging, shoot-and-flop theatrics and defensive indifference?
How long before Harden would bristle at Butler’s I’m-the-only-real-man-here attitude, his enchantment with all things Hollywood and his insistence on playing lockdown defense?
But no. Instead of forcing the 76ers into a sign-and-trade that would have sent him to the Rockets, Butler went the sign-and-trade route with the Heat. Now it’s down to the dotting of I’s and the crossing of T’s. Sigh. There’s only emptiness in that development for those of us who view the NBA as 25 percent basketball and 75 percent runny mascara.
It should have been obvious the city of Houston wouldn’t cut it for Butler, who likes glitz. Recall that some of the criticism of him the last several seasons has been for his embrace of all things Hollywood. Has ‘‘Hollywood’’ ever been a good connotation? No, it hasn’t. So we should have known Butler would choose the Heat and go all South Beach on us. That idea wasn’t obvious leading up to the start of free agency, but when news broke Sunday that he was going to Miami, it all made sense. Lights, camera, mojitos!
Butler and Harden together would have been the most NBA of all NBA telenovelas, which is saying something. Again, sigh.
It was a wild first day of free agency, with Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan all agreeing to sign with the Nets because this is the NBA. Big things happen. Stars align with each other and form supergroups. Teams are there as landing strips for private jets, nothing more.
For a bit of sports context, recall that it took free-agent closer Craig Kimbrel more than two months to sign with the Cubs because it was Major League Collusion — Major League Baseball, I mean. In the NBA, the owners bow to the players.
The Bulls reportedly agreed to a three-year contract with former Pacers forward Thaddeus Young. Some landing strips are bigger than others. Did they get better? As with anything relating to the franchise, your guess is as good as vice president John Paxson’s.
To review, Sunday was a crazy day, with ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski breaking virtually every contract agreement on Twitter.
As for who won and who lost, good luck with that. The big talent has congregated in several cities, and we’ll have to wait until the 2020 playoffs to figure out what it all means. LeBron James still looks like the big winner, with his Lakers trading their future for Anthony Davis late last month.
But as the dust cleared Sunday, there was only regret for those of us who had hoped Butler would be joining Harden with the Rockets. A few days earlier, Wojnarowski had reported the Rockets were hoping Butler would force the 76ers into a sign-and-trade.
I was hoping Butler wouldn’t come to his senses. I was hoping he’d think he and Harden would be able to get along. I wanted to see the spontaneous combustion that would have occurred when Butler realized Harden wanted the ball all the time and when Harden realized Butler was serious about this whole defense thing.
Butler has morphed into someone who seems to live for drama. After demanding a trade from the Timberwolves before the 2018-19 season, he went on a verbal tirade against teammates, coaches and front-office executives during a practice. That included him yelling at general manager Scott Layden: ‘‘You f------ need me! You can’t win without me!’’ Lots of people around the league were surprised by the outburst; Chicago was not.
Hours later, he sat down for an interview with ESPN’s ‘‘The Jump’’ to talk about his diatribe. Also not surprising.
So now he reportedly is going to the Heat, where there certainly will be more drama, just not the buckets of it there would have been if he had teamed with Harden on the Rockets. That would have been very good for the NBA. It would have been great for the viewing, gossiping audience.
Alas, no. A dark day, indeed.
