ORLANDO, Fla. — The silence has been broken, amid Miami Heat hopes that silence now can follow.

In the wake of increasing conjecture of Jimmy Butler pushing for a trade and the team considering a deal, Miami Heat President Pat Riley on Thursday issued a terse and pointed statement on the matter.

“We usually don’t comment on rumors, but all this speculation has become a distraction to the team and is not fair to the players and coaches,” Riley said. “Therefore, we will make it clear — we are not trading Jimmy Butler.”

In addition, a person intimately familiar with the machinations of recent days said that at no point has Butler requested a trade. Earlier, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra also said Thursday that the desire of the team is to move forward with Butler, while also pausing to address reports of his star forward preferring to be elsewhere.

“That’s just the deal,” Spoelstra said of Christmas Day turning into conflicting reports of Butler privately expressing a desire to move elsewhere and the Sun Sentinel confirming from both sides of the equation that there had been no trade demand put forward. “You have to compartmentalize in this business. We want Jimmy here. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. And it’s just unfortunate that you have to control or deal with a lot of the noise on the outside.”

Thursday was the first opportunity for the Heat to address the speculation, with the team idle for Christmas, traveling to Orlando on Wednesday evening. Spoelstra spoke after the morning shootaround, ahead of Thursday night’s game against the Orlando Magic at Kia Center.

“In terms of this morning, this was a pretty focused group coming off of the last game that we came here,” Spoelstra said, with the Heat blowing a 22-point lead at the start of the fourth quarter in Saturday night’s 121-114 loss in Orlando. “The guys understand the task at hand and looking forward to getting out there on the wood and trying to redeem what happened the last time we were here.”

It is a process that instead came in the wake of the ESPN discussion about Butler’s reported desires, with Butler having been away from the team the past week with what has been listed as a stomach ailment.

Christmas gains

The NBA got viewers for Christmas, even while going up against NFL games.

The NBA’s five-game Christmas lineup was the league’s most-watched in five years, with the games averaging about 5.25 million viewers per game across ABC, ESPN and its platforms, the league said Thursday based on Nielsen’s preliminary numbers.

It’s an 84% rise over the NBA’s Christmas numbers from 2023.

The Los Angeles Lakers’ 115-113 victory over the Golden State Warriors — a game pitting Olympic teammates LeBron James and Stephen Curry — averaged 7.76 million viewers and peaked with about 8.32 million viewers toward the end of the contest, the league said.

Those numbers represent the most-watched NBA regular season game in five years.