For the most part, it’s a fool’s errand to try to figure out why one athlete has a mostly injury-free career and another has his career largely derailed by one ailment after another. Lonzo Ball, unfortunately, falls into the latter category.
Since 2022, Ball has had three knee surgeries that cost him two full seasons. He didn’t play in an NBA game for nearly three years. The last surgery was, as his doctor described it, a Hail Mary to save his career. It included a cartilage transplant from a cadaver, a rare procedure for which there wasn’t a single successful recovery by an NBA player.
It worked. Ball made it back onto the court for the Bulls‘ opening night this season before going down with a wrist injury from which he recently returned. He’s only played in six games this season, but that’s six more than it was looking like he might ever get to play in again.
Was Ball just one of unlucky souls stricken by the randomly administered injury curse? Or was there something to point to, be it in his training regimen or even his equipment, that could explain all his troubles?
Ball has thoughts on that, and his father, LaVar Ball, who constructed one of the all-time hype machines around his three sons, isn’t going to like where Lonzo’s finger is pointing. What did Spike Lee say to the great Michael Jordan? It’s gotta be the shoes!
In a revealing interview with ESPN, Ball admitted that he wonders whether the Big Baller Brand shoes that his father created and essentially forced Lonzo’s feet into were actually the culprit behind at least the start of his knee problems. Ball described the initial version of the Big Baller Brand shoes as “like kickball shoes.”
Did Lonzo actually want to wear Big Baller Brand shoes?
“I was an Adidas kid since high school, so I was thinking that was going to be the route,” Ball said. “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.’”
The problem, Ball said, was that the first shoes his dad had made for him to wear at NBA summer league in 2017 were unwearable.
“They were like kickball shoes,” Ball said. He wore them just twice that summer. He and his manager, Darren Moore, went out to Foot Locker stores in Las Vegas to buy a different pair of high-end shoes for each game. Ball played one game each in the Air Jordan XXXI, Nike Kobe A.D., Adidas Harden LS and Under Armour Curry 4 en route to winning summer league MVP.
Eventually, Big Baller Brand set up an arrangement with Skechers to manufacture its shoes, which Ball wore for his entire rookie season. But Ball said he wasn’t happy with those shoes either and believes they could have contributed to the first meniscus injury he suffered as a rookie in January 2018.
“I think it’s a possibility for sure, to be honest with you,” Ball said. “I wasn’t really getting hurt like that until I started wearing them.”
Obviously nobody could ever say whether these shoes, which were selling for an outrageous $495 despite being a clearly inferior product, had any part in Ball’s injury troubles.
But if Lonzo isn’t ruling it out, I guess nobody should.
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