Potential Denver Nuggets trade package for Jimmy Butler has Michael Porter Jr.'s $35.2M contract as main chip
The Miami Heat are one of the premier destinations for talent in the NBA. Between the warm weather and big-market opportunities, convincing a free agent to sign there isn't typically a difficult sell.
They landed star forward Jimmy Butler in the 2019 offseason and have since been to two NBA finals. The Heat are an organization that strives to be competitive every season, and yet despite that, outside of moves on the margin, they haven't made a major trade in several years.
In fact, while several teams in the Eastern Conference have bolstered their rosters in an attempt to compete with the Boston Celtics, the Heat have mostly retained the same faces.
As a result, the Heat haven't been a dominant regular season team since the 2021-2022 season and now are reaching a point where things might need shaking up.
During the 2023 offseason, the Heat made serious efforts to acquire Damian Lillard from the Portland Trail Blazers in order to form a Big Three with Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, but were ultimately unsuccessful, with Lillard landing in Milwaukee. After their failed bid, the Heat did not make any alternative moves and returned to training camp largely the same.
Then, before the beginning of the 2024-2025 season, Pat Riley, the president of the Miami Heat, noted that the organization would wait until after the season to decide on what to do about Jimmy Butler's expiring contract. Butler followed suit by making it known he would be forgoing his player option for the 2025-2026 season and become a free agent.
Now, over a quarter way through the season, after years of labeling Butler as "untouchable," the Heat are open to hearing trade offers for him. It's understood around the NBA that a player of Butler's caliber would prefer to go to a competitive organization, and thus he's been linked to teams like the Golden State Warriors and Dallas Mavericks.
One team that's recently emerged as a suiter is the Denver Nuggets.
The extent to which the Nuggets become a serious landing spot for Jimmy Butler depends heavily on how much they value their 26-year-old sharpshooter Michael Porter Jr. He's a 6-foot-10 wing from the University of Missouri who was drafted by the Nuggets in 2018. He's shot 40.8% from 3-point range in his career and was a key part of their 2023 championship run.
Porter is in his third season as part of a five-year, $179,299,750 rookie extension and is still owed nearly $80,000,000 over the next two seasons. This means his contract takes up a significant portion of the Nuggets' salary cap and limits their options in trying to build around Nikola Jokić.
The Nuggets also have Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon on payroll who are both earning over $30,000,000 per season for the next few years. The reason Porter's contract may be the odd one out is that Murray and Gordon are ineligible to be traded due to having signed their extensions just this offseason.
The Nuggets have little draft capital to use in a deal and are already sitting right below the second apron (meaning they can't take on additional salary in a trade). This has led to the following three-team deal being proposed:
Nuggets get:
- Jimmy Butler
Heat get:
- Michael Porter Jr.
- Zeke Nnaji
- A 2026 first-round pick swap
- A 2031 first-round swap
Pistons get:
- Dario Šarić
In this hypothetical, the Nuggets receive a star-level player in Butler to pair alongside Jokić to remain a top dog in the competitive Western Conference. The Heat get a sniper from 3 who's only starting to enter into his prime and a solid role player in Zeke Nnaji (who is mainly getting attached for the sake of matching Jimmy Butler's salary).
Finally, the Pistons receive Nuggets' backup forward Dario Šarić, who hasn't played much, in exchange for adding their 2026 first-round pick swap to sweeten the deal for Miami.