How many kids does Jimmy Butler have? Taking a closer look at the Heat star's family
NBA fans are getting to see a different side of Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler's personal life. Butler is one of the stars of Netflix's Starting 5, a documentary following five basketball players during the 2023-24 season. During the series, the swingman lets people know more about his family life.
Butler has two kids, Rylee, born in 2019, and Brayan, born a few years later. Both kids appear in the documentary and Rylee even talks about his father's favorite type of coffee, cappuccino.
"My kids, they really set everything in like proportion, the way that I look at things because when I come home, they don't care if I had a triple-double or if I fouled out in the first three minutes of the game, I'm just their dad," he said in the show, per People. "They could care less about anything else. Whenever I'm home, I try to the best of my ability to be their dad first."
Back in 2023, Jimmy Butler told ABC News that his kids are his driving force.
“I always talk about my ‘why,’ and my ‘why’ are my kids," Butler said. "Like everything I do now, I want to make it home to them. I want to make sure they're safe.”
The mother of Jimmy Butler's children is Kaitlin Nowak, a fashion model and social media influencer. Butler and Nowak do not appear together in public or on social media. They have been together since at least 2019 when Rylee was born.
While not much is known about Brayan, who has not been seen by the public outside of the series, there are a bit more tidbits available about Rylee. She is into tennis and, according to Butler in March 2022, her favorite tennis player is British star Emma Raducanu, who won the 2021 US Open.
And during an April 2021 episode of The Artist and The Athlete podcast, Butler shared that Rylee is the goddaughter of Butler's former Heat teammate, Kyle Lowry.
Jimmy Butler reflects on his father's death
Besides showing his love for his kids, Jimmy Butler opened up about his father's death during the 2023-24 NBA season. The Miami Heat star explained how painful it was.
"No amount of money in the world could bring him back. Basketball, no matter how much I played it, it couldn't fix that," he said, per Bleacher Report.
Butler hasn't had an easy life, as he struggled to find a home at a young age. His mother kicked him out of his house for his looks and basketball was pretty much everything he had at the time.
But it appears he is doing his best to give his children a much better childhood than he had experienced.