Thank you for reading The Dope. For only $7 a month, you can receive everything we post.
The Chicago Bulls probably aren’t pinging on your basketball radar, nor should they be. The Bulls finished with a 39-43 regular-season record, and they had to win their final three games to do that. In the NBA’s Eastern Conference, that left Chicago in 9th place. The Bulls will meet the Miami Heat on Wednesday in a play-in game, which is to say, they have to win that game — and one after that — in order to reach the actual NBA playoffs.
So no, not a memorable campaign. But the Bulls do have an intriguing air about them, and I think I know why: They’re being trailed by a ghost. It’s the ghost of one of their own players’ careers.
The playoffs should be Lonzo Ball’s time to shine. That’s what we told ourselves years ago, when Ball burst out of UCLA after a single season of college ball because the Los Angeles Lakers wanted to take the L.A.-area kid with the second overall pick in the 2017 draft. Lonzo was an absurdly gifted passer who led the NCAA in assists for the 2016-17 season, and despite imperfect shot mechanics that led to some eye-wateringly poor attempts, he consistently found ways to score. He could pull down boards, and defend. He ran the floor like a gazelle.
Ball was a credible threat — and he was so, so fun to watch. After drafting him, Magic Johnson told reporters, “He has greatness written all over him.” Rob Pelinka, the team’s GM, called Ball “a transcendent talent.” Magic is a master of hyperbole, so naturally he predicted that someday Lonzo’s jersey would hang in the rafters alongside all-time Lakers greats like Jerry West, James Worthy, Kareem, and Magic himself.
And here we are: Spring 2025. Lonzo Ball’s NBA career looks like a car after the fellas get done stripping it for parts. The Lakers? That was a couple of teams ago. The Bulls squad for which he now plays barely knows him, because it took Ball three years just to get back on the court from his multiple knee surgeries. He is injured again, this time a wrist, and he has been down since late February. Ball isn’t expected to suit up against Miami.
No rafters. No transcendence. Just that outsized talent, which could leave you shaking your head in appreciation as you watched. And, of course, the ghost.
We’ll never know exactly what happened to Lonzo Ball’s left knee. How injuries occur to premier athletes, and what damage those injuries cause both now and later, is a mostly inscrutable topic and a fool’s errand. Some guys stay healthy despite piles of evidence that suggest they shouldn’t; others fall quickly, repeatedly and heartbreakingly.
What is in the public record about Ball is certainly gruesome enough. He wrecked the knee fairly early in his NBA career — he missed 30 games in his rookie season with the Lakers in part because of soreness there — and it got worse and worse. Just a few months ago, nearly a decade gone by, Lonzo finally acknowledged that wearing his dad LaVar’s idiot Big Baller Brand shoes when he first hit the NBA may have caused some of the knee damage — but again, it’s speculative.
"I think it's a possibility for sure, to be honest with you," Ball told ESPN. "I wasn't really getting hurt like that until I started wearing them."
Lonzo had always been an Adidas guy, but he says he was told coming out of college that nobody wanted to partner with him. (Really? Didn’t want to partner with the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft?) And so, armed with what sure sounds like a load of misinformation, Ball instead repped his father’s Big Baller shoes.
“They were like kickball shoes,” Ball later said — unwearable, he meant. They were so terrible that during the NBA’s summer league in 2017, Ball and his agent went out between games and bought better shoes off the rack at whatever shoe store they could find, just to get him through the schedule.
Eventually, even Lonzo’s check-cashing daddy realized how inferior the BBB product was, and he partnered with a Skechers subsidiary to manufacture a new line. (Skechers? For basketball?) Lonzo wore those, too — BBB ZO2 Prime, they were called, and they listed for $495. Ball thinks that wearing them may have contributed to his first diagnosed meniscus tear, in 2018. You may remember photos of those BBB shoes; Lonzo later said on a teammate’s podcast that they ripped apart so quickly, he had to change into a new pair after every quarter during NBA games.
Why wear them?
“‘Cause they were my shoe,” Ball said on the podcast. “I had to debut them.”
What followed is honestly difficult to recount. After dealing with knee issues on and off for four years, Ball finally had his first full-blown meniscus surgery in January 2022. He went on to miss all of the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons in Chicago — three knee surgeries, each worse than the last. The final procedure involved transplanting cartilage from a cadaver to act as replacement meniscus, a move than even the surgeon labeled a “Hail Mary.”
It is perhaps incredible, then, that Ball is still playing at all. He returned to the Bulls in a limited-minutes role last fall, and in January of this year he started an NBA game for the first time in 1,006 days.
The numbers no longer pop. Ball averaged about 22 minutes in the 35 regular-season games in which he appeared this season; he shot 37% from the floor and had 3.3 assists per game. He’s a guy wearing a uniform.
Considering everything, “guy wearing a uniform” means a lot more than it otherwise might, and Ball has that appreciation. He also knows that from the 30,000-foot view, he’s fine. Ball has signed roughly $112 million worth of NBA contracts, so unless something has gone horribly wrong, he and his family will not want. And he can reach that 30,000-foot view, too. In the midst of his own story, Ball has seen his mother struggle valiantly after suffering a severe stroke in 2017, just as his basketball career looked poised to go supersonic.
"I see the stuff that she goes through, and it's like, that's 10 times worse than what I have to deal with," he told ESPN. "It just puts things into perspective."
So he has that. But you’ve got to remember that Ball was going to be one of the reasons people watched this league. He really did have a chance to be transcendent. The Lakers overhyped him because everybody overhypes everything, but if you ever watched Lonzo play before the injuries consumed him, you know I’m telling the truth.
The Lakers didn’t get too far down that road, by the way — the road to Ball’s jersey hanging in the rafters. After Lonzo’s second season, they threw him into a multi-player trade with New Orleans that brought them Anthony Davis, with whom L.A. won a championship the following year. Lonzo, thus a Pelican, commenced his professional sojourn.
That part is not unusual; players come and go. The churn of elite talent is the heartbeat of every professional league I’ve ever covered.
Ball could’ve been something, though. Now all we have is the ghost, and the man it trails.
Want to know a secret? Lonzo Ball is 27 years old.
Thank you Mark. So sobering.
Definitely a cautionary tale, Lonzo Ball, is…injuries do happen, but not necessarily from overzealous and ill-advised promotion of a very bad shoe (aw, c’mon Dad).
This is somewhat reminiscent of the Greg Cook story…a short-lived career for what appeared to be a generational QB talent for the ‘69 bengals…an undiagnosed torn rotator cuff his rookie year masked with cortisone shots…never to return to form, struggling over the next 4 seasons & forced to leave the game.
Both stories are tragic.