Jimmy Butler Credits Mark Wahlberg For His Acting Skills While Flopping

Flopping in the NBA is a tricky subject. A few years back, the league implemented a new “respect the game” initiative, one of the tenets being a supposed crackdown on blatant flopping, with a series of fines handed down to serial offenders. But anyone who watches the game regularly knows that some players still do their best to oversell the contact on a fairly regular basis.

It’s hard to eradicate something that had become so insidious over the years, as players grew increasingly savvy about how to toe that careful line between selling contact and putting on an Oscar-worthy performance. Gary Trent Jr., for instance, recently joined the latter ranks with his Hall-of-Fame-level flop against the Thunder, one that was the textbook definition of a fine-able offense.

On Tuesday, Jimmy Butler submitted his own entry into the cannon late in the fourth quarter against the Knicks, although the obvious meta-nature of this one puts it in a category of its own.