Jimmy Butler had an espresso machine in the NBA bubble.
Not a Keurig. Not the hotel drip coffee sitting on a warmer since six in the morning. An actual espresso machine, his own beans, a setup he refused to travel without — because the man is serious about coffee the way he's serious about everything, which is to say: completely, and in a way that reads to most people as excessive until they realize it's just intentional.
And then, because the bubble was a closed ecosystem with no outside options and a captive audience of NBA players who also didn't want the hotel coffee — he started selling it. Twenty dollars a cup. Big faces only. You didn't have a twenty? Give him the fifty. He wasn't making change.
Jabari Young — senior writer at Forbes, editorial lead for Forbes Black, the journalist who sat down with Butler more than once to actually understand what Big Face Coffee is — told me the origin story on this week's show, and the part that stuck wasn't the twenty dollars. The part that stuck was the simplicity of the calculus: supply, demand, and a platform he already had, on the biggest stage of his career, generating free publicity he didn't have to pay for.
That's the whole thing. Jimmy Butler didn't start a coffee company. He identified a moment when every condition for a business launch had been handed to him by accident, and he was awake enough to see it.
Most people in that bubble were waiting for the season to restart. Butler was already at work.
The moment you're handed the platform is the moment to move
Jabari quoted the owner of the New York Islanders — not Jimmy, not a coffee executive, a hockey team owner — and the quote is the key to understanding how Big Face actually got built: "You know the best thing about owning a sports team? You never have to pay for marketing. We get the front page of the newspaper every single time."
Jimmy understood this intuitively. The bubble was the most concentrated media environment the NBA had ever created — reporters with nothing to cover but the players in front of them, fans following every ambient story, everyone looking for something to write about besides basketball. And here's Jimmy Butler, charging $20 a cup, taking only big-faced bills, giving the setup a name and a concept before there was a logo or a website or a co-packer. The story wrote itself. He just had to have the product and the audacity to be doing it in the first place.
This is the thing I keep coming back to. Most athletes, when they get a business idea, the first instinct is to wait until the career is over before they really pour into it. Save it for when there's time. Start it when things calm down. But the career is exactly when the platform is live — the interviews, the access, the eyeballs, the credibility. By the time most guys get around to it, they're running their brand on residual goodwill instead of active visibility, and it costs ten times more to acquire the same attention.
Butler didn't wait. He worked the platform while he had it.
The $65,000 lesson about knowing your product
Here's where it gets real.
In the early stages of building Big Face out of the bubble and into an actual company — trademarks filed, Shopify partnership struck, e-commerce running — Jimmy Butler went to a Cup of Excellence auction and spent over $65,000 on premium El Salvador beans.
He was doing what someone serious about coffee does. He went and found the best beans he could find, because he's Jimmy Butler and when he commits to something he commits all the way. The problem was that at the unit economics of what he could charge for a cup of coffee, or a bag of beans, or a subscription — you can't make that number work. The beans cost more than the revenue they generate. He found out the hard way.
Jabari put it plainly: he's learning how to shut the hell up and listen to other people around him.
That sentence, in the context of Jimmy Butler, is worth pausing on. Because this is a man who has built his entire career on a specific kind of stubbornness — the guy who showed up at Target at four in the morning for two-a-day workouts before he was even a starter, the guy who forced his way from a bench role at Chicago to being the best player on three different contenders through sheer, relentless will. Stubbornness is the asset that got him here.
And the $65,000 beans are what happens when you apply that same stubbornness to a domain where you don't yet have the expertise to know what to be stubborn about. The will is right. The knowledge base behind the will is still being built.
This is the version of the story that doesn't get told in the press release. The brand is working. The Miami brick-and-mortar is open. The Paris Saint-Germain partnership is real. And inside all of that, Jimmy Butler is still figuring out which decisions to trust his instincts on and which ones to defer to the people he's hired.
That's not a knock. That's what building actually looks like. The gap between the idea and the operation — the same gap I've watched trap athletes across every industry — is where you either grow or you don't.
PULL QUOTE: "He's learning how to shut the hell up and listen to other people around him." — Jabari Young, on what Jimmy Butler had to figure out between the bubble and the brick-and-mortar
The cheat code athletes don't use
Jabari said something in the back half of the conversation that I don't want to bury. He brought up Junior Bridgeman — who passed away earlier this year, and who was a mentor to me in the hospitality space in ways I'm still processing — and the thing Junior did that almost no active player does: every city he went to, he met with a top CEO.
Not for a deal. Not because he had something to pitch. Just to learn. Canceled his evening plans and walked into offices where people who ran real companies were willing to teach him things that would have taken years and a lot of tuition to learn otherwise.
And Jabari's point was sharp: those CEOs won't take the journalist's call. They'll cancel things for the athlete. Every road trip is a free education from someone at the top of the food chain in whatever city you're landing in. That's the cheat code. Most guys use the road trip for the club or the restaurant. Junior used it for the classroom.
I did a version of this. Early 2000s, I was interning and doing externships during the offseason, and I had a day at Starbucks with Howard Schultz and his team — just sitting in and trying to understand how they were thinking about building stores at scale. I was a kid from the Pacific Northwest who loved coffee and was curious about business. Nobody asked me to go do that. I just went.
That day didn't make me any money directly. But the model of thinking it introduced — how a physical retail concept scales, what the unit economics of a location look like, where the operational complexity lives — I've been living inside that framework for twenty years since. Starbucks is struggling right now for exactly the reasons Jabari laid out: they optimized for throughput and lost the thing that made people choose them in the first place. The experience. The personalization. You can understand that failure only if you understood what they were doing right in the first place.
Junior Bridgeman understood it. Jimmy Butler, in his own way, understands it. Most active players don't bother to find out.
What I'd tell Jimmy right now, if he asked
Three things — honestly, in the order I think they matter:
- Own the experience before you own the real estate. The Miami location is a lease, and Jabari thinks that's probably right for where Jimmy is. I think so too, but for a specific reason: the experience hasn't been proven at scale yet. What does a Big Face Coffee store feel like at its best? What's the thing that makes someone walk in, buy a cup, and immediately want to tell someone about it? Until that's defined and repeatable — until the staff, the layout, the ritual of the thing is locked in — buying the building is buying a liability before it's an asset. Get the experience right on someone else's square footage. Then own the ground underneath it.
- The capital question is coming faster than it looks. Jimmy Butler is fully self-funded right now. No investors. Sole owner. Jabari made clear: that's admirable, and it's also a ceiling. The brick-and-mortar costs, the labor costs, the raw materials in a tariff environment, the health insurance once you have eight to ten employees — operational costs don't stay flat. They compound. The smart time to bring in outside capital is before you need it desperately, when you still have negotiating leverage and a brand that's genuinely hot. Right now, Big Face has both of those things. The window where he can set the terms on an investment deal — rather than accept someone else's — is open. It won't stay open indefinitely.
- Find the Dutch Bros. equivalent of a mentor and go deep. Jabari brought up Dutch Bros. the way I've been thinking about them for years — pure hustle, localized, expanded the right way, a story that maps onto exactly what Jimmy is trying to build. There are people inside Dutch Bros., or who built Dutch Bros. from the ground up, who understand the operational playbook for turning a passionate local coffee concept into a regional and eventually national brand. Jimmy should be calling those people. Not for investment. For the education. The same way Junior Bridgeman met with CEOs in every city, Jimmy should be sitting down with the people who've navigated exactly this transition — from concept to company — and extracting everything they're willing to share.
The bubble was five years ago. The brick-and-mortar is open. The PSG deal is signed. None of that happened by accident, and none of it happened without Jimmy Butler making time — real time, not ten minutes — to be present in the building of the thing.
The next five years will be harder than the last five. Harder because the easy part was the idea and the brand. The hard part is the operation at scale, and that's where most athlete-entrepreneurs stop being athletes and have to become something different.
Whether Jimmy makes that transition is the story. We're just in the early chapters.