Let's Help Jimmy Butler Customize His Ride In Even More Irresponsible Ways

Jimmy Butler is one of the NBA's most fascinating and productive young players, and one of the game's least likely stars. His rise from an impossibly difficult early life to Marquette to NBA All-Star has been irresistible, and both unexpected and totally reasonable. It's the residue of unstinting and unceasing work, a great deal of natural talent, and the sort of complicated luck that helps all unexpected stars—Butler was the last player picked in 2011's first round and barely played as a rookie—break out. As a profile of Butler in Chicago Magazine makes clear, Butler is taking exactly none of it for granted, from the good fortune—the 26-year-old lives with two childhood friends, and happily spends $1500 at a pop on Nerf guns—to the work required to keep it going.

This is all good, and extremely admirable, and not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about this embedded detail in Bryan Smith's story about Butler:

[Butler] loathes reliving the past—so much so that he has removed the rearview mirror on his car (yes, really) as a symbolic reminder to never look back.

Symbolically, this is a good choice. In every other sense, it is extremely not a good choice! We do not get to live symbolically—well, Kanye does, but no one else—and talking about how you don't need to look back because the past is past and the future is bright is a very different thing than backing optimistically into a cop car for those abstracted reasons.

But this is Jimmy Butler's life to live, and we are not here to be critics. Better, we think, to support Butler in building a car that reflects his values and personal narrative. And so we got together with the professionals at the Vice Custom Garage to finish pimping Jimmy Butler's ride so that it physically embodies every element of the personal narrative that will continue to carry Butler to the top of his field, and the Bulls to the top of the Eastern Conference.

Please read the following in an Xzibit voice, and with an implied, "Hey Jimmy, we heard you like to excel at basketball, so" preceding each bullet point. Thank you.

• "…we removed the trunk of your car so that you won't bring any baggage into the season, only focus and the desire to be the best."
• "…we put 44-inch wheels on your sports car, because the road to the playoffs is sure to have plenty of potholes."
• "…because we know you like to play all-out, all-the-time, we replaced your brakes with an extra gas pedal."
• "…because we know you don't care about what haters on the sidelines think, all windows in your car are now tinted so much that they're effectively impossible to see through."
• "…because we know you're trying to tune out distractions in general, we blacked out your windshield except for a small portion directly at eye level."
• "…because you're making progress every day, your car no longer can go in reverse."
• "…because you know there is no easy way to get where you want to be, we have removed power steering from the vehicle."
• "…because you know it's important to raise the play of others, your car horn now plays a recording of a hoarse and incensed Tom Thibodeau screaming profanities."
• "…because losing hurts, every time, we have removed the airbags."
• "…because you know this season is a marathon, and not a sprint, you have only two gears."
• "…because your hard work is the thing that will get you where you're going, the engine has been removed in favor of a 'Flintstone' hole in the undercarriage, so you can carry the vehicle forward on foot."
• "…because we know it's important to stay humble, we swapped your actual car out for a 1990 Ford Festiva with a cassette of Sisqo's The Dragon stuck in the tape deck."

Happy motoring!