In July 2019, the Los Angeles Lakers shipped out Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, Josh Hart and three first-round draft picks to the New Orleans Pelicans in return for superstar big man Anthony Davis.
Still, LaVar Ball, the controversial and outspoken father of Lonzo Ball, thinks that the Lakers should thank him for the 2020 NBA championship.
“Heck no,” the elder Ball said on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast, Club Shay Shay, when asked if he was impressed with the Lakers. “They in the bubble. They’re in the bubble and all this stuff goes right. Like I told them, they need to send me a Thank You card on the fact that I gave incentive to win. I said they’d never ever, ever, ever win. You know they was talking about that the whole year. What did you say last year that somebody remembers? That’s how I be living in people’s heads…just so they can say, ‘I told you that you was wrong.’ I still go to bed, take me a nap, eat my donuts and I don’t think about nothing. They’ve been thinking about this for a whole year.”
The younger Ball was drafted by the Purple and Gold with the second overall pick in the 2017 NBA Draft. He was instantly expected to become a superstar and possibly a future Hall of Famer, mostly because his father incessantly hyped him up.
After three seasons, the younger Ball has shown some improvement, most notably with his 3-point shooting, but he’s nowhere close to becoming a superstar, let alone an All-Star.
However, the Pelicans have a promising young team themselves, now that they possess phenom Zion Williamson and All-Star Ingram.
After attracting tons of attention a couple of years ago for his many outlandish statements, it seems that people have, by and large, learned to tune out the elder Ball.
