Lonzo Ball’s basketball career, which started out with so much promise (and hype), hasn’t exactly panned out the way his dad, LaVar, said it would. Then again, maybe LaVar Ball has contributed to why it’s gone the way it has.
At least that’s the feeling you get when you hear Lonzo Ball admit he regrets letting his dad control so much of his early basketball career, including wearing his dad’s Big Baller Brand sneakers.
“I felt like when I had gotten drafted, I was just doing that, you know, listening to my pops, you know, doing this and that and that’s what it was,” Lonzo Ball told Michael Porter Jr. on his Curious Mike podcast. “But if I can go back, I would obviously do it different. I would actually, you know, get an agent, you know, be in the meetings myself, you know, do what I want to do.
“But to answer your question, it was like I didn’t like the shoes. I addressed I didn’t like the shoes, but then we would get into an argument and it would be like, damn, like if you don’t wear the shoes, then like you going against the family type s—.”
About those shoes…
“It wasn’t a basketball shoe, bro. It wasn’t ready to be used. So I tried to play in it, but they would rip and pop out like every quarter,” Ball told Porter.
“DMo [Darren Moore, Lonzo Ball’s manager] had backup shoes in his backpack that he would give me right over the bench and s— if they would blow out and s— like that. I’m like, ‘I can’t play like this, bro.’ And right when I changed my shoes, I started playing great again.
That isn’t the first time Lonzo Ball has expressed regret over wearing LaVar’s Big Baller Brand sneakers. In 2024, during an interview with ESPN, Ball said, “They were like kickball shoes.”
He also said he believes they may have contributed to the first meniscus injury that he suffered as a rookie in January 2018.
“I think it’s a possibility for sure, to be honest with you… I wasn’t really getting hurt like that until I started wearing them,” he said.
Ball would end up missing two full seasons and has never played in more than 63 games in any season. Four times he played in less than 48 games, and three times he has played just 35 games. In February, the Utah Jazz traded for him but waived him the same day, and he is currently a free agent.