The Phoenix Suns very clearly want to acquire Jimmy Butler, and while Butler has not explicitly said the feeling is reciprocated, well, the feeling is reciprocated. Reports indicate that Butler sees the Suns as the team that would give him the lucrative contract extension he’s eligible to receive this offseason and covets, while Phoenix is more all-in than basically any team we’ve seen in recent memory.

Now, we can sit here and argue about whether or not this is a good move for everyone — frankly, I think the Suns trying to make another win-now trade isn’t a good idea, as they’re in title-or-bust mode with a roster that doesn’t make sense and wouldn’t suddenly make sense by turning Bradley Beal into Butler. But the team is very clearly taking a different approach to things, and as such, we’re going to try to answer a very simply question today: How the hell are they gonna make this all work?

We’re at the weird point of the trade saga where it’s pretty clear that the most likely outcome is Butler ends up in Phoenix — he wants it, they want it, and you should never discount a team or a star when they’re both motivated and desperate. However, the steps to getting there are complicated and the power is in the hands of other parties to get Butler to the Suns.

ALREADY DONE: Phoenix gets some more picks in the door

The inherent problem with anything the Suns try to do is that they’ve already traded everything. The deals to bring in Kevin Durant, Bradley Beal, Royce O’Neale, Nick Richards, etc. have almost completely drained their stash of future picks, and entering Tuesday, their draft capital looked like this:

A 2026 first-round pick that Washington, Orlando, and Memphis all had swap rights on to varying degrees
A 2026 second-round pick from Denver
Their own 2031 first-round pick
Their own 2031 second-round pick
A 2031 second-round pick from Denver

That’s … not great. However, in a bit of savvy maneuvering, the team turned that 2031 first into three future firsts on Tuesday. As Keith Smith mentioned, this gives Phoenix considerably more wiggle room in navigating the Stepien Rule, as they now have access to more picks they can move (either their own or from other teams) in every year from 2025-30. Now, this could mean that they’re just trying to get stuff they can attach to guys like Jusuf Nurkic or Grayson Allen — guys with multi-year deals that cost a lot of money, which are particularly burdensome when you’re a second apron team — or it could all be an effort to get more stuff to sweeten the pot in a Butler deal. Or both! Who knows?

Anyway, having more stuff to trade when you are a team that doesn’t have a ton of stuff to trade but want to pull off deals is a huge piece of the puzzle. While guys like Ryan Dunn and Oso Ighodaro are promising, they aren’t centerpieces of a big deal, and candidly, Phoenix should probably not trade two of their only guys who are young and athletic as their roster gets older and more fragile. As such, picks are worth their weight in gold, and the Suns now have a lot more to play with.

(It’s worth mentioning: Phoenix is about $28 million over the second apron, which among other things means they cannot aggregate salaries in a trade. If they do individual deals with these picks to get off of Nurkic and Allen’s salaries, they’d be sending out a little under $34 million in salary, so it’d make some sense to do those two things as a precursor to a potential Butler deal.)

NEXT: Solve the Bradley Beal dilemma

Beal has a no-trade clause, which is rare in the NBA because you run the risk of having the exact situation the Suns currently have with Bradley Beal. Is he a terrible player? No, but his fit in Phoenix has not been as good as the Suns hoped, he’s been moved to the bench, and he just can’t impact games the way that he did earlier in his career when he was an All-Star. He’s also owed about $50 million this year, $53.7 next year, and has a player option for $57.1 million in 2026-27, which is not ideal.

All of this is to say that Beal is the single most powerful person in all of this. He has given no indication that he wants a trade or would waive his NTC under any circumstance, and if he refuses to do that, the only path to getting Butler for Phoenix involves moving Devin Booker or Kevin Durant, which would make trading for Butler useless, because then they’re in all-out rebuild mode.

So, basically, Phoenix has to find a team that wants Beal and would be appealing enough for him that he’d want to waive his NTC. Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly what Beal would want — hell, we don’t know if there’s any way he’d be willing to waive it! And further complicating things is the rumor that Miami does not want to take back too much long-term money in a Butler trade, so the Suns can’t just hope he’d go to South Beach, despite their previous interest in him. But let’s turn to The Athletic for some guidance on that first bit:

As several rival executives indicated, Milwaukee is a team worth monitoring as the Suns continue to look for third-team partners in a Butler deal. Per league sources, the Bucks’ motives would be two-fold: Cut enough salary from their payroll to get under the second apron — the only way the Bucks can legally complete a trade while aggregating contracts — and also add a talented, highly paid player to play next to Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard, the NBA’s top scoring duo. Whether that would be Beal, or perhaps a star like Chicago’s Zach LaVine, in other potential scenarios remains to be seen.

Now, we can debate whether the Bucks trying to acquire Beal would be a good idea — I think it’d probably work out about as well as Beal in Phoenix has — but let’s take this seriously as the one team we know wants Beal. Milwaukee is about $6.5 million above the second apron, so the first domino would presumably involve moving Khris Middleton, Brook Lopez (the most unlikely of the names here), Bobby Portis, or Pat Connaughton. The one team that can just straight up take a player into cap space right now is Detroit, which has done a decent job in the last year acquiring veterans on shorter deals that they could flip if they play well. So for the sake of this, let’s imagine a deal where Connaughton and Milwaukee’s 2031 second-round pick go to Detroit for a heavily-protected future second-round pick that never actually conveys — say, a 2027 second that is top-59 protected.

This makes it easier for the Bucks (which would no longer be in the ultra-punitive second apron) to pull off a Beal trade, even if it would probably have to be a multi-team deal, because there’s no way that a package of, for example, Middleton and Portis are going to the Suns. But for Phoenix’s pursuit of Butler, having a place that they can send Beal when a full-scale Butler trade happens is a gigantic hurdle that would be cleared, and it’s probably safe to assume that the final trade would include Milwaukee getting a pick or two back from the Suns for facilitating all of this.

AFTER THAT: Pull in additional teams to make it all work, maybe

Here’s what the framework of our hypothetical trade looks like now:

PHOENIX GETS: Jimmy Butler
MILWAUKEE GETS: Bradley Beal
MIAMI GETS: ???

You can make a case that Milwaukee trying to get Middleton and Portis isn’t the worst idea, as both have player options for 2025-26, and the Heat could get them off the books after next year and be in a nice position to strike in free agency or the trade market — Terry Rozier and Duncan Robinson both come completely off the books after next season, too. Having said that, if the Bucks are gonna make a move like this, I don’t think just dumping either guy makes a ton of sense. Middleton’s injury issues might make him a bit more difficult to get value back for, but Portis could help a team that has aspirations of winning right now but could use a frontcourt player that brings all the stuff he brings. Plus, just getting Middleton back is a pretty strange haul for Butler.

Could a team like Sacramento, which has turned its season around since firing Mike Brown, decide it wants some reinforcements and dangle a youngster to get Portis? Could Dallas, which has been hammered by injuries this season, try to sneak in and get Portis with an eye on having even more shooting around Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving, particularly in 2025-26? Would the Pistons wanna make a buy-low bet on Middleton, with the hopes that playing alongside Cade Cunningham could help him find his form? And if any of these teams get pulled into a deal, how would the stuff that they send out get allocated? Is it possible that other teams just don’t get involved, and Miami is happy with a return of Middleton, Portis, and whatever picks/young players Phoenix would throw their way? Does Phoenix even have enough stuff to incentivize both the Bucks and the Heat to do a deal?

All of this is to say that, while Phoenix is moving towards a Butler deal, there is still a ton that needs to happen, some of which is outside Miami’s control. We’re about two weeks away from the trade deadline, so it’s possible those dominoes end up falling, and the sheer desperation that Phoenix, Butler, and to a lesser extent Miami have to make a deal work ends up leading to something happening. But if we get to the afternoon of Feb. 6 and Jimmy Butler is still a member of the Heat, we can probably guess that it has something to do with how far this needs to go before it gets to the finish line.