On October 11th, the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Miami Heat in Game 6 of the NBA Championship, securing the franchise’s 17th title and robbing the world of Jimmy Butler coffee news for which we were all rabid. The “Big Face Coffee Era” is what historians will call that brief time period because absolutely nothing else of note was transpiring concurrently. Luckily, after an abbreviated three-month offseason (gotta get everything rolling in time for those Christmas day games), the start of the 2021 NBA season is but a mere two weeks away, and it brings with it more Jimmy Butler coffee news to quench our thirst.
As reported by Heat Nation, Jimmy Butler offered part-ownership in Big Face Coffee to Heat teammate Bam Adebayo for a breezy $2.5 million.
Adebayo, the Heat’s athletic big man and owner of the nastiest block in NBA playoff history, has been itching to get involved with Big Face Coffee, the pop-up coffee shop Butler started in his hotel room in the NBA’s Orlando playoff bubble. According to Bleacher Report’s Taylor Rooks retelling of the story on The Lowe Podcast, once Butler had begun the process of trademarking the Big Face brand, Adebayo wanted in. This without even tasting the merchandise, stating he “didn’t want to try the coffee until he was a part owner.”
Butler agreed to let Adebayo in on the company, but it was going to cost him $2.5 million, which Adebayo declined. At the time, this was 50% of the big man’s gross earnings for the 2020 season, making it a non-insignificant figure, even for a top-tier professional athlete. But after signing a new contract over the summer, earning him roughly $28 million each of the next five years, Adebayo is better positioned to diversify his portfolio.
Admittedly, $2.5 million sounds pretty high for an ownership stake in a coffee company. But when you consider that Big Face makes its nut off of selling $20 cups of coffee to a captivated (read: sequestered) audience of millionaires, the number starts to make a little more sense. With the Heat poised to make a similarly deep run in the playoffs this year, it stands to reason that the 2021 Big Face pop-up, now with more brand recognition, will be open for quite a while serving a much larger customer base.
And who knows, if Adebayo comes on board, we could be talking multiple locations. A Big Face Coffee on the corner of every hotel floor in the 2021 playoff bubble. Just think, you could meet your special someone at a Big Face Coffee. Not the same Big Face Coffee, but you could see each other at different Big Face Coffee’s across the hall from each other.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
