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Hardaway Sr. criticizes Butler for Heat ending as 'crybaby'

It’s no secret that Jimmy Butler’s tenure with the Miami Heat ended on a sour note.

Before he was shipped off to the Warriors in a blockbuster deal before the NBA’s Feb. 6 trade deadline, Butler was serving an indefinite suspension, his third ban in a month, for a “continued pattern of disregard of team rules.”

Former Heat and Warriors guard Tim Hardaway Sr. joined SiriusXM’s NBA Radio from All-Star Weekend in San Francisco and criticized Butler for how he handled his 2024-25 season with the Heat, which reportedly consisted of the star forward missing team practices and flights after requesting a trade.

"[Jimmy Butler's] a baby. [He's] a crybaby"

Heat and Warriors legend Tim Hardaway Sr. had some choice words for Jimmy Butler with @TheFrankIsola and @TermineRadio #HeatCulture pic.twitter.com/26QkHPiF0V

— SiriusXM NBA Radio (@SiriusXMNBA) February 18, 2025

“I’ve been telling folks this, especially for the last week, especially here. I didn’t agree with what he was doing,” Hardaway said. “You’re under contract. You a baby. You’re a crybaby, because they said ‘No’ to you. We used to get ‘No’ said to us all the time and we used to know how to take it. It is what it is, it’s a question, you get a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No.’ You might not like the question, but you can’t deviate and mess up the team, alright?”

Butler, throughout his first five seasons with the Heat from 2019-20 through 2023-24, averaged 22 missed games per season, likely due to injuries, rest or other reasons.

Hardaway criticizes Butler for missing so many games and explained why his absence might have played a role in Miami landing in the NBA Play-In Tournament in each of the past two seasons.

“They said, ‘No, we want to see you play more games. We don’t want to be in the play-in games.’ If he played more games, they would have never been in the play-in games both years,” Hardaway explained. “Even though they went to the championship, they never would have been in the play-in games. That takes a lot out of you.

“They want to say ‘Look, we want a week off, we want a week to prepare and we need that week because we play hard each and every game and we need to rest.’ So he wasn’t willing to do that, and I fault them for letting him get away with a bunch of stuff too. You gotta nip it in the bud. When he went after [Erik] Spoelstra [and] told Spoelstra he’d kick his butt at a timeout and they had to take another timeout because Udonis Haslem was circling around, that should have been like ‘Yo, you’re getting [suspended] three to five games, you don’t talk to the coach like that. You don’t disrespect the coach like that.”

There reportedly was some initial trepidation in the Warriors’ locker room about the possibility of trading for Butler after how his tenure with the Heat ended.

However, in four games with their new star forward, the Warriors are 3-1 and seemingly injected with new life heading into the final stretch of the regular season.

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