Hair makes the man
On resistance via the haircuts of Jimmy Butler.
Hey everyone in the BASKETBALLWEATHER uni-pop-verse.
I’m beyond excited to share this week’s podcast with you. In it, we talk about potential. The way potential works in the NBA, and out here in the real world as well. We’ve shortened the length of the episodes and have begun to find a little groove, one where a debate between two unique perspectives emerges in every ep: The Fan vs The Media. Apple, Youtube, and Spotify when you’re ready to check it out, I hope you will.
Re: potential, the timing couldn’t be better because this is usually the time of year, just before the season starts, when teams get excited about what their ‘potential might be.’ Players coming into the league out of college or high school as rookies have the “potential” to be great, or a team’s ability to do x, y, and z, has potential, and then the big one that really affects everything — injury.
Injuries mean everything to a team’s “potential,” and teams that have been built to withstand it, have the best chance at being able to make it through the grind of the 82 game season. The Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics playbook, basically.
As long as 82 games are being played in the NBA, or an 18th game wants to be wedged into a brutal NFL season, the way we talk about our favorite teams is going to live in the endless land of capital “P” — potential. Or is it capital “C” — capitalism?
Now let’s talk about Jimmy Butler’s hair—
“Emo Jimmy” that is.
Okay, apologies to the rest of the world, but it seems like I am the last to know that Jimmy Butler is a bonafide prankster. To the ignorant, something needs to be explained!
NBA media day is this thing that happens every year prior to the start of the regular season. I am not a professional media person, so I have not attended, but apparently it’s an important event for players and teams to make their introductions to the press for the upcoming NBA season.
For established players like Jimmy Butler, NBA media day might be repetitive and somewhat boring, akin to getting your picture taken on the first day of school. But despite this your picture on Media Day is important. Perhaps the most valuable purpose of the picture is that it is the one that will be shown during every game you play that season.
All 82 of them.
What’s so funny is that Jimmy Butler shows up to Media Day every year, at the start of every season, with a different haircut, never to be worn or seen again.
So, you show up with a haircut that the media is going use in every game you play that year, all 82 of them, and it’s not your actual haircut?
Hilarious.
Genius.
Here’s a pic, from another angle, of Jimmy’s Media Day doo from 2023, last season.
And now here’s one from this year’s media day, just a few weeks ago.
See the diff. All business, right?
That’s pretty much what happens when your boss chimes in and tells you to get your shit together.
In Jimmy’s case, the boss is Pat Riley, an 9 time NBA champion, Pacino vibes, who doesn’t mess around. He also has amazing hair btw.
But wait, what does Pat Riley have to do with Jimmy Butler’s hair?
It’s a fair question.
To make a long story short, after a lackluster season last year, Pat Riley railed into Jimmy Butler, and basically told him, in not so many words, that he could kiss his next big contract goodbye if he didn’t do more for the team. Aka he might not be re-signed by his team if he did not make himself more available throughout the season, implying that Jimmy was a jokester who did not take his job seriously.
Here’s the exact quote:
"If you're not on the court playing against Boston or on the court playing against New York, you should keep your mouth shut."
It might not seem like much, but the message was loud and clear to those in the know, the equivalent of Tony Soprano sending you the wrong look in between bites of his lasagna.
Well,
Let’s just say that Jimmy received the message. He wasn’t about to leave a couple hundred million dollars on the table because of a haircut. When it came time to get to media day this year he was ready for it. No pranks, no jokes.
Clean cut.
Take a look at that pic again.
All business. And can you blame him?
We’re all free as the wind until it comes down to our money, and then we realize that we can keep dancing if we want to, but we’re probably going to be the only one on the dance floor (freakin’ to Boyz to Men) when the music stops.
Even for someone of Jimmy Butler’s stature, there’s a line, and I imagine that the message he was trying to send with his clean-cut hairdo a few weeks ago is the exact opposite of the one he was sending when he showed up as “Emo Jimmy.” For the record, I’m down with Jimmy, however he wants to roll, though empathize with Pat Riley on this one.
Life is complicated, man.
After all, I too succumbed this past week to a haircut, replacing a stubborn mop that contained all of my creative power, with a cleaner cut.
That mop finally just had to go.
It’s possible that over the last year it had begun to look more and more like an exploded bag of Cheetos on my head, especially in the Zoom backgrounds of Zoom calls I had with a big client the other week 😵💫
But I loved it.
But then I thought, “Emo Jimmy.”
I bet Jimmy Butler is going to have a hell of a year for the Miami Heat, this year. Me too, damnit. Haircuts matter.
As a wise man once said, hair makes the man.
Okay, okay, thanks for being here. Remember to check out this week’s pod where we drill into potential, and what the economy of potential in the NBA means for us out here in the real world. Apple, Spotify, Youtube. See you again soon.