The Golden State Warriors were dealt a significant blow on Monday night when small forward Jimmy Butler suffered a season-ending ACL tear, according ESPN’s Shams Charania. Golden State had been trending up prior to the injury and walked away with a win against the Miami Heat even after Butler went down in the third quarter.
The Warriors have won seven of their last 10 contests, and, at 24-19, are suddenly within range of a top-six seed in the Western Conference.
But losing their second-best player — who was still playing at a high two-way level even if Butler isn’t quite in his prime anymore — could effectively doom the current roster’s run. In 38 games, the 6-foot-6 Marquette product hwas averaging 20.0 points on .519/.376/.864 shooting splits, 5.6 rebounds, and 4.9 assists a night. He had also been the club’s best perimeter defender. No one on that team can possibly replace the cumulative impact of what Butler gives the Warriors as a great Robin to Stephen Curry’s Batman.
That does not mean the Warriors don’t have options.
But it does fundamentally change how they’ll now likely have to approach the Feb. 5 trade deadline.
Beyond the Warriors’ suddenly murky immediate future, the Butler news will have some unhappy downstream impacts for hypothetical trade partners, including our Chicago Bulls.
© Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY SportsHow The Jimmy Butler Injury Changes The Warriors’ Trade Calculus
More peripheral win-now pieces on expiring deals could understandably become less appetizing for Golden State. You can’t build out your roster if one of your two core pieces is down for the count. Heck, head coach Steve Kerr might even have to (gasp) play Jonathan Kuminga now!
Golden State could look to ditch Butler’s contract this year, so as not to burn another great Stephen Curry run, but that would represent a more tectonic deal. Flipping Butler and future draft capital for a somewhat risky, depreciated All-Star asset like Anthony Davis or Zion Williamson would make some sense.
The New York Knicks might hang up the phone since it would burn their 2025-26 chances, but five-time All-Star center/power forward Karl-Anthony Towns would be a pretty fun theoretical pairing alongside Curry, and could give Golden State more opportunities to explore five-out lineups (Al Horford is no longer Al Horford, so he can only provide this in small doses).
The 29-year-old would also represent a bridge to a promising future when the soon-to-be-38-year-old Curry is no longer performing at an All-NBA level.
© David Banks-Imagn ImagesRemaining Options for Bulls-Warriors Deals
As we’ve talked about here a lot recently, moving Vucevic should be a priority for the Bulls. And it seems it might be increasingly possible that it might actually happen. Even Stacey King, long an ardent advocate for Vucevic getting more touches, said on a new episode of his podcast “Gimme The Hot Sauce” that he would be happy to ship him out the door for Kuminga.
Would you trade Nikola Vucevic for Jonathan Kuminga?“I would make it in a second”- Stacey King?️?️WATCH NOW: t.co/l8Rc9CFpCF pic.twitter.com/yKVCoFLTdl
— Gimme The Hot Sauce Podcast (@gimmehotsauce21) January 20, 2026Again, it feels like peripheral deals to shore up the rotation no longer make much sense for Golden State at this stage. That means potential deals for Bulls Nikola Vucevic or Ayo Dosunmu — both of whom would have made sense for what the Warriors needed before the injury — are likely off the table.
The Warriors should look for blockbuster shakeups to give Curry a few more shots at playoff glory.
Moving Butler is the only way to guarantee that. However, while Butler is this writer’s favorite active player, there odds are incredibly slim the cheapskate Bulls are taking back his money just so he can retire on the team that drafted him. He is owed $111 million across the next two seasons.
Chicago barely has anyone under long-term team control. Seven of the Bulls’ standard roster players are on expiring deals, while Julian Phillips’ 2026-27 team option is unlikely to be renewed unless he really, really turns things around here.
Thinking big-picture, Chicago team president Arturas Karnisovas should be amenable to any deal for the right price. So yes, in theory even Josh Giddey should be on the table.
Giddey’s trade value is a bit of a question mark, however. He’s talented in a vacuum, a perpetual triple-double threat on a likely lottery team. But we’ve already seen him wash out of a winning situation with the Oklahoma City Thunder, so there are questions as to how much of his growth in Chicago is real.
A deal I could see making some sense for both parties is an Isaac Okoro trade. Chicago’s best defender by a mile, Okoro is owed a relatively reasonable $22.8 million across the next two seasons, and would help supplement the Butler loss in terms of adding perimeter defense and the occasional made corner triple.
Power forward/center Jalen Smith doesn’t give Golden State the rim protection it so badly needs and is not a particularly great defender or rebounder, but he’s still just 25 and a solid 3-point shooter who at least is pretty mobile.
These are the kinds of the pieces who could net the Bulls some second-round picks, assets the team has never really valued but probably should.
Benny Sieu-Imagn ImagesGolden State’s Big Fish
Hovering above the Warriors’ whole season (and, well, a lot of their 2024-25 campaign pre-Butler trade) has been the specter of a potentially franchise-altering blockbuster prize: 10-time All-Star Milwaukee Bucks superstar power forward Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Beyond the Butler contract (which expires in 2026-27) and young pieces like Jonathan Kuminga, Brandin Podziesmki and Moses Moody, the Warriors currently have two tradeable first-round picks, plus movable two second-rounders and four additional first-round pick swaps, at their disposal. Normally, pick swaps are a bit of a throw-in, as there’s no guarantee those draft selections will actually be worse than the recipient team’s own picks in a given year.
But even beyond Butler, core Warriors stars Curry and Draymond Green are ancient — so there’s a good chance they’ll have retired or become bench pieces/token starters by the time the swaps become due, meaning they could have real value.
Should Antetokounmpo force a trade out of Milwaukee, the Bucks would likely try to extract an All-Star-caliber young piece from another team. None of the Warriors’ developing players appear to have that kind of upside. Still, all those picks, the impending 2027 cap space after Butler comes off the books, and semi-appetizing youthful role players isn’t a terrible haul for a 31-year-old big man whose game is predicated on athleticism and whose body has already shown some wear and tear in recent seasons.
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