Jimmy Butler and the 76ers are still figuring each other out

A bit more than a week into the Jimmy Butler Era in Philadelphia, it’s fair to say that things are progressing for the 76ers in fits and starts. Philly is 5-2 in the seven games Butler has played, sandwiching a four-game winning streak featuring close victories over the Jazz, Hornets, Suns, and Pelicans with losses to the Magic and Cavaliers.

Butler himself has been pretty damn good for the Sixers — even discounting his game-winning 3 against the Hornets in overtime and the nearly duplicate one he hit Sunday against Brooklyn. He’s playing 35.0 minutes per game and averaging 20.3 points, 4.7 rebounds, 3.0 assists, and 2.1 steals a night while shooting 55-51-86 from the field. It’s clear, though, that Butler is still trying to find his way in the offense. His 13.9 shots per game with Philly represent a steep drop from where he was in Minnesota (15.7 per game), while his 21.7 percent usage rate is barely above the league average and his assist rate has fallen off as well.

Some of that is to be expected. It takes time to adjust to new surroundings, and it especially takes time to adjust to playing with star teammates with games as unique as those of Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. And since Butler spends most of his time on the floor playing alongside those guys, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that he’s not necessarily forcefully asserted himself just yet.

Consider the following chart, which breaks down Butler’s playing time into the minutes he’d played alongside Simmons, Embiid, and J.J. Redick together and all of his other minutes. See if you can identify some trends (All numbers for the balance of this piece are as of Sunday afternoon, prior to the win over Brooklyn):

So, that’s all pretty glaring. When Butler has played with Philadelphia’s best trio, the Sixers have been quite good … but he’s essentially been turned into a glorified version of Robert Covington, a low-usage, high-efficiency wing whose job is largely to defend the best perimeter threat on the other team. Covington had a 14.3 percent usage rate in Philly and often took the most difficult perimeter defensive matchup when on the floor. Similarly, Butler has a 14 percent usage rate when playing alongside the team’s other stars and has defended the opposing team’s primary ball-handler or usage rate leader on 53 percent of his defensive possessions with Philly, per an analysis of Second Spectrum defensive matchup data.

With any of the three other primary options off the floor, Butler has attempted to assert himself — but to largely middling results. His 26.3 percent usage rate in those situations is on part with the career-high figure he posted during his final season with the Bulls (26.5 percent), but his true shooting percentage of 51.5 percent would represent his worst mark over the course of any full NBA season.

Tactically, the Sixers do not appear to have installed a lot of new sets to take advantage of Butler’s specific skill sets yet. Instead, they have largely dropped him into existing sets while moving some of the other pieces around. Take the game-opening plays they ran in the final game before they acquired Butler and the first game in which he appeared, for example.

That’s the exact same set, with the only change being Butler sliding into Redick’s spot and Redick taking the place of Markelle Fultz.

Even the stuff the Sixers have designed for Butler is fairly elementary, and shows that he has not yet been fully integrated into their system. For example, during the team’s one-point win over the Pelicans on Wednesday, Butler didn’t have a play run specifically for him until there were around five minutes left in the second quarter. That play saw Butler make a standard “Iverson” cut across the floor, where he could isolation his man on a cleared-out side. The Sixers ran precisely four other actions during the entire game that were clearly designed for Butler to get the ball. Two of those four were the exact same Iverson cut and wing isolation. All of them yielded heavily contested mid-range jumpers.

The other times they attempted to get Butler the ball were on plays where the Sixers attempted to leverage their tendency to run more dribble hand-offs than anyone in the league in order to get Butler easy baskets at the rim. They had Butler fake a screen for a shooter or fake a cut toward the ball-handler, only to then have him wheel around and go backdoor instead. One of those plays resulted in a steal, another became a missed jumper after the backdoor pass was too low, and Jrue Holiday recognized the play on the third, forcing Simmons to kick the ball to Wilson Chandler on the opposite wing for a 3-pointer.

Other than those plays, the only times Butler had anything designed for him came on after timeout plays. Obviously, that’s when you can draw up a play that everybody knows exactly how to run. Even on the plays where Butler made his Iverson cut, you could see Simmons and T.J. McConnell alerting Butler to the incoming screens and directing him to make said Iverson cut to the opposite wing. This is the clear mark of a player who a team is still attempting to fully integrate into the offense, and has to be told that an action is about to be run for him to get the ball. Considering he’s only been with the team a week and a half, that makes a ton of sense.

It’s going to take some time for the Sixers to figure out how to best use Butler’s skills. It’s going to take them even more time to design actions to put him in position to succeed and have those actions be seamlessly integrated into their offense. But the talent level here is immense, and even when he’s not being used as a foundational offensive player, Butler still has tremendous value due to his ability to create for himself and defend any player on the floor. If they ever figure out how to get the best of him on both sides of the floor at the same time, the returns will far exceed what they gave up to acquire him.