Lonzo Ball had plenty of time to think about where it all went wrong during the 1,000-plus day knee injury rehab.
Was it the hours of being playing on a concrete court?
Or maybe trying to come back to the NBA’s Bulls before he completely healed?
Perhaps it was the sneakers slung by his attention-thirsty dad LaVar, who wanted to capitalize on Lonzo’s rising fame with his Big Baller Brand sneakers.
Ball, drafted No. 2 overall by the Lakers in 2017, isn’t ruling anything out — even when it comes to the shoes he was forced to wear in his first NBA summer league in 2017.
“They were like kickball shoes,” Ball told ESPN, adding that he wore the BBB sneakers just twice while he and his manager bought several pairs of high-end basketball footwear in Las Vegas to wear as he played his way to summer league MVP.
In January 2018, Ball suffered a meniscus injury — the first of several knee issues he’d encounter — and the timing of that ailment does make him wonder if it had to do with the Big Baller Brand shoes.
“I think it’s a possibility for sure, to be honest with you,” Ball, now 27, said. “I wasn’t really getting hurt like that until I started wearing them.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d opened up LaVar’s brand to questions and criticism, telling Josh Hart’s “LightHarted Podcast” in 2019 that BBB’s signature ZO2 sneakers had problems.
“If you literally have those shoes from those games, they’re exploded,” he said.
As Ball revealed, it didn’t have to be that way.
“I was an Adidas kid since high school, so I was thinking that was going to be the route,” he told ESPN. “But what was told to me, I guess, wasn’t what really happened. I was told that nobody wanted to partner with me, so my dad was like, ‘Just rock the brand.’ And I was like, ‘All right.’”
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