Data / entry 03 / March 2025 / 5 min read

Can Jimmy Butler get the Warriors a championship

Golden State was a play-in team when they traded for Jimmy Butler. Five weeks later Draymond is guaranteeing a championship on national TV. I wanted to know how much of that is real.

On the night of the All-Star Game, with the Warriors at 28-27 and clinging to the final play-in spot, Draymond Green went on national TV and said, flatly, that Golden State was going to win the championship. Four games into the Jimmy Butler era. Marcus's reaction was the correct instinct. But I didn't want to just laugh along, so I pulled the record, the odds, and Butler's actual numbers since the trade closed on February 6th.

Where this team was standing before the trade

Golden State was 25-25 the day the trade broke, tied for the tenth seed, the last spot in the play-in tournament. Andrew Wiggins, Kyle Anderson, and a protected first-round pick went to Miami for a 35-year-old with a suspension history and a documented pattern of forcing his way out of buildings. It was a real risk. It just also happened to work, almost immediately.

Here's the number that actually stopped me:

Since Butler's debut on February 8th, the Warriors are 14-1 in games he's played, including a seven-game winning streak. They've climbed from the 10th seed to the 7th, and they're a game and a half back of the 6th, which is the difference between skipping the play-in entirely and surviving two extra do-or-die games just to get in.

What Butler is actually giving them

The scoring number is almost beside the point. With Miami he averaged 17.0 points, 5.2 rebounds, 4.8 assists. With Golden State: 16.4 points, 5.8 rebounds, 5.6 assists, 1.3 steals. His scoring barely moved, his rebounding and playmaking both went up. That's a guy who slotted into a system that already had a ball-dominant guard in Curry and found the gaps instead of forcing his old role on top of it.

It shows up in the numbers that predict winning: the Warriors went from getting outscored by 90 points when Curry sits to plus-33 without him, and from minus-98 without Draymond to plus-39. That's the whole bench playing better, not one guy putting up a stat line. The playoff odds market noticed too, moving Golden State from roughly a coin flip to make the play-in field to -140 to make the playoffs outright within two weeks.

What the title odds say

This is the number I trust more than the record, because it's forward-looking. American odds convert to implied probability with 100 divided by (odds plus 100). Before the trade the Warriors sat at 2.0%. By mid-March they were at 5.0%, the seventh-best title odds in the league. Five percent sounds small until you remember it's 2.5 times where they started three weeks earlier. The trajectory is the story, not the raw number.

The honest answer

They're not the favorite, they're 7th on the board, and a 35-year-old with a long injury history is the engine of the whole thing. One bad back spasm and this piece looks silly. But "can Butler get them a championship" was never the right question. The right question was whether this team is a legitimate threat instead of a lottery team wearing a jersey, and on that, the data says yes. Draymond might still be wrong about the guarantee. He's not wrong that something real changed.