The circus that Jimmy Butler brought to Minnesota on Wednesday included a planned, sit-down interview with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols.
He spoke with Nichols after his explosive return to practice with the Timberwolves, in which he confirmed he was intense, yelling at coaches and teammates, namely Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins.
ESPN reported that Butler, at one point, yelled to general manager Scott Layden: “You f—— need me.”
The Athletic reports that Butler walked out of practice after just one hour and said: “I run this s—.”
“A lot of it is true,” Butler told Nichols. “I haven’t played basketball in so long. I’m so passionate. I don’t do it for any reason but to compete. All my emotion came out in one time. Was it the right way? No. But I can’t control that when I’m out there competing. That’s raw me, me at my finest, me at my purest. Inside the lines.”
“I think that I was honest. Was I brutally honest? Yes. But I think that’s the problem, everybody’s so scared to be honest with one another,” he said. “If you didn’t like the way that I handled myself in practice, why don’t the players come up to me? Somebody say something. Anybody. I’m not going to take it offensively, it’s not personal.”
Speaking of being honest, Thibodeau has claimed that the first he’d heard of Butler’s desire to be traded was in September when he flew to L.A. for a one-on-one meeting with Butler.
Butler told Nichols that’s a lie, sternly saying he told Thibodeau of his wish to be traded just four days after the Rockets knocked the Wolves out of the playoffs.
Flew out to MN to talk to @JimmyButler about how he got here with the Wolves & whether a trade is really the only way out. Of course once he went through that, um, contentious practice, we discussed all that too 😂But his answers on the original topic also packed plenty of punch: pic.twitter.com/ujB6EaqdCG
— Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) October 11, 2018
Butler told ESPN that he plans to practice with the Wolves again on Thursday, but that doesn’t mean his relationship with the team is improving.
“It’s not fixed,” Butler said. “Let’s be honest.”
Does he think the situation will be resolved? “It could be. Do I think so? No.”
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