MIAMI — Bam Adebayo would be the perfect face of the Miami Heat as they open their season Wednesday night. He’s a good veteran, a pro’s pro. He comes with a heartwarming backstory of his mother taking him from the hard streets of New Jersey to the back country of North Carolina to keep him out of trouble.
Adebayo also grew up — and grew good — in the Heat organization, where he’s friendly enough to remember people’s names.
“I’m excited for this season, just like the start of every season,’’ Adebayo said after practice Tuesday afternoon. “Let’s get going.”
Yes, Adebayo would be the perfect face of this team. It’s just that Jimmy Butler is that face, and it comes with the kind of competitive sneer or mocking smile that people will stare at when he takes the court again Wednesday. No one will stare harder than fans of the opening opponent, the Chicago Bulls.
They’ll have to think: How’d we let him go? They remember the stories of Butler’ edginess, probably can still recite chapter and verse of how disliked he was inside the team.
“A jerk,’’ Butler once described the way he was viewed at times by his former teams, Chicago, Minnesota and Philadelphia.
He didn’t say that view was wrong, by the way. Nor has Butler seemed to change the way he goes about work. He still doesn’t just come with an edge. He wields it. He’s the guy who caused a scrum inside team during a timeout last year and left the locker room after dispatching his former team Philadelphia in the playoffs shouting, “They chose Tobias Harris over me?”
Here’s what has changed around Butler: The narrative. He took the Miami Heat to the NBA Finals his first season here in 2019-20. He carried a hobbled team to within his rim-rattling 3-point shot of doing so again last year in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals.
The league pariah is now a leader in voice, spirit and deed. Was it the “Heat Culture?” Has he found his place? Is it simply a perfect marriage of a player’s talent and organizational temperament as Dwyane Wade said? He told Butler, “You’ve got to get to the Heat.”
“Every team in the league should want a guy like Jimmy Butler,’’ Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “That’s why we sought him so aggressively. That’s why I wanted to coach him for so long, for so many years. Earlier in his career, I had coaching envy. I wanted him on our side because he approaches it the same way we do, very seriously about competition.
“His intensity level is always at a peak level. You practice and you compete — he’s competing to win, even in these kind of [practice] scrimmages. It means a lot to him. That sets the tone for everybody walking in the building, and you can develop great habits, because he has a very unique and great attention to detail.”
There he’s been after practice, schooling a young player like Jamal Cain in one-on-one sessions. It’s become a rite of passage inside the Heat. Max Strus once did it, too.
“We go as Jimmy goes,’’ Strus said. “Everybody knows that. He’s one of the best in the league, so he’s going to set the tone, and we’re always going to try to follow behind.”
“A different cat,’’ Adebayo said of Butler. “He’s one of those guys who sees things differently, the whole spectrum. He sees the whole game. The one thing he does have is a brain. He’s always thinking.”
It all starts again Wednesday for the Heat after a quiet offseason. There was talk of Kevin Durant or Donovan Mitchell that never went beyond talk. Forward P.J. Tucker went to Philadelphia. Tyler Herro said he wanted to start and now will.
The Heat aren’t seen as a top team in the East, typically predicted to finish behind Milwaukee, Boston and Philadelphia. No surprise there. They weren’t expected to do anything when they went to the NBA Finals or anything in coming with in a shot of it last year.
Spoelstra’s teams always get better through the year. But it’s a players’ league. Adebayo is a star. Butler remains the face of the franchise entering another year — and befitting the Heat’s edge, it’s a face with a sneer.
