It’s mid-March, and the Warriors are playing their best ball of the season.
Golden State is 12-1 with Jimmy Butler in the lineup and nine games over .500 — tied with its season-high — as it has climbed from 11th place at the end of January to sixth in the West.
Seemingly everything has clicked into place with Butler. He has slid role players like Moses Moody, Brandin Podziemski and Gui Santos down the rotation and transformed the Warriors into the kind of two-way force they’ve aspired to become since training camp. Since the Butler trade, the Warriors (37-28) rank fifth in offensive rating and second in defensive rating.
His presence has Draymond Green talking about a championship again — an outlandish prediction when he made it at All-Star weekend in February that suddenly isn’t so crazy. It’s a sprint to the finish, as head coach Steve Kerr likes to say, and the Warriors are looking spry.
An axiom in the NBA is that the champion isn’t always the best team, but the hottest (and healthiest) in March, April, May and June.
Like many adages, there’s truth to the sentiment. But there might not be as much correlation between hot teams after the All-Star break and playoff success as you’d think. Playing your best ball heading in the home stretch of the regular season certainly doesn’t guarantee anything.
Last season, the Celtics ripped off the best record in the league after the All-Star break, riding a 21-6 into the playoffs, where they rolled to the NBA championship.
But they’re an outlier in recent history.
Two years ago, the Nuggets beat the Heat in the Finals. Both teams were mediocre after the All-Star break, going 12-11 — tied for the 15th-best record in that span.
But Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray flipped the switch in the playoffs, as did Butler — “Playoff Jimmy” — for Miami.
Butler, like his championship stalwart teammates Green and Steph Curry, knows what it takes to make deep playoff runs. He carried the Heat to two Finals appearances in his five seasons in Miami.
What does he think about the value of peaking at the right time?
“I mean, I think all the value lies within winning as a whole,” Butler said after Golden State’s 130-120 win over Portland on Monday. “I’m glad that I have the opportunity to be a part of the winning that we’re doing here. Just playing some incredible basketball, playing together on both sides of the floor. It’s really fun.”
Playing incredible basketball, though, really only matters once the postseason begins — not necessarily in the weeks leading up to it.
The Warriors in 2022 stumbled into the postseason, dealing with injuries to Green and Curry. After the All-Star break that season, Golden State went 11-12.
But it all came together in May and June. That’s the time to play incredible basketball.
In the past three seasons, the 15 teams with the best post-All-Star break records combined for a play-in loss (Warriors last season), two first-round exits, six second-round exits, three conference finals, two Finals berths and one championship.
The Warriors have hit the ground running faster with Butler than anyone could have expected. Skipping past a feeling-out stage that often comes with such a major acquisition is a huge accomplishment.
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Since the break, the Warriors are 9-1, second only to the 10-0 Cavaliers. They’ve enjoyed a relatively soft patch of their schedule, but have taken care of business in a manner befitting of a legitimate contender.
Golden State has 17 games left and will have to reintegrate Jonathan Kuminga back into the lineup after he has missed the past 31 games. Nine of those 17 are at Chase Center and six are against the tanking Blazers, Spurs, Raptors and Pelicans.
Finishing strong doesn’t create a fast track to the Finals, but it doesn’t hurt. Butler has found a team that knows when to peak.
“I think it’s everything that I expected,” Butler said. “Everything that I actually dreamed of, too if I’m being brutally honest. They just want to win. There ain’t no individual goals here, they don’t care who scores, they don’t care who gets triple-doubles. None of that. All I want to do is win a championship.”
