Warriors lose Jimmy Butler to a season-ending injury
The Golden State Warriors just got punched in the mouth. After running the Miami Heat out of Chase Center with a dominant 135-112 win, marking their fourth straight, the entire night got hijacked midway through the third quarter when Jimmy Butler went down with an injury that everybody in the building immediately knew wasn’t normal.
With 7:41 left in the third, Jimmy Butler went up to snag an entry pass in the paint, collided with Heat guard Davion Mitchell, and his right knee twisted on the landing. He hit the deck hard, grabbed the knee, and stayed there while teammates and staff surrounded him. It was one of those moments where you stop pretending sports are just entertainment and you start doing math on what this means.
Warriors lose Jimmy Butler to a season-ending injury
A few hours later, the worst-case update landed. Shams Charania reported Jimmy Butler suffered a torn right ACL, confirmed by an MRI, which ends his 2025-26 season.
The most Jimmy Butler part of the whole thing is that even while he was down, he was still cracking jokes. Stephen Curry said Butler was joking on the floor like it was just another Monday night inconvenience, which is funny in the moment until you remember he still had to be helped off and couldn’t put weight on the leg.
Buddy Hield and Jonathan Kuminga had to drape his arms over their shoulders to get him down the tunnel, and he was headed toward a wheelchair near the locker room entrance.
Before he went out, Jimmy Butler had 17 points in 21 minutes against his former team, and he has been exactly what the Warriors needed when they made the move to bring him in.
The Warriors have won 12 of its last 16, and Jimmy Butler’s January production had been a major part of that climb, averaging over 21 a night on strong efficiency.
The Warriors were starting to look like a problem again. Now they’re starting to look like a franchise that has to make hard decisions fast.
Golden State was already hunting for reinforcements ahead of the Feb. 5 trade deadline, and now the entire plan changes. Jimmy Butler was the co-star that made the Curry era feel dangerous again.
Take that away, and suddenly you’re asking an aging core to survive the Western Conference without the guy who was supposed to carry the heavy minutes when things got ugly.
Jimmy Butler is making $54.1 million this season and $56.8 million next season. That’s not a footnote. That’s an alarm bell. The Warriors now have to navigate the rest of this season without one of their leaders, and they have to stare down a future that was already complicated before their second star’s knee exploded on national television.
The Warriors beat the Heat by 23. The Warriors also lost the thing that made this season feel like it had a real point.
Join The Chase
Read More
There’s a Dead Sea Scroll made of copper that lists 64 locations of buried treasure and nobody has found any of it in 73 years
For anyone who isn’t familiar, the Dead Sea Scrolls are…
Everything is Fine: ‘City Killer’ Asteroid is flying past Earth closer than ever on Monday and they only found out about a few days ago
An asteroid called 2026 JH2 is going to fly past…
A Ukrainian businessman threw a rock at an endangered monk seal named Lani in Hawaii, got beat up by a local, and a state senator gave the guy who beat him up an award
A Ukrainian businessman named Igor Lytvynchuk threw a “coconut-sized” rock…
Comments (0)