If you grew up playing pickup basketball, you know all the different characters you encounter on the court, and they generally span the spectrum from mildly irritating to downright rage-inducing. There are entire YouTube videos devoted to these stereotypes, which include, but are not limited to, “Tall Guy Who Only Shoots Threes,” “the Football Player,” “Mr. Excuses,” and so on and so forth.
But the worst is arguably the most basic of them all: the ball-hog who dribbles too much and takes terrible shots all the damn time. If LaMelo Ball‘s latest “highlights” are any indication, the Chino Hills product falls firmly into that dubious category. On Sunday, a video emerged of Ball family patriarch LaVar going off on his AAU team, naturally named The Big Ballers.
And there was good reason for that. They were in the midst of what ended up being a humiliating 109-57 blowout loss, during which his supposed five-star recruit son, LaMelo, was personally responsible for all sorts of god-awful sequences.
https://twitter.com/nballaccess/status/868883321308274689
To be fair, everybody’s entitled to a bad game every now and then (unless your name’s LeBron James, then it’s obviously a sign of the apocalypse). Yet this particular video betrays the types of bad habits and questionable tendencies that would make anyone wary. The full “highlights” from the game can be seen below, as LaMelo’s team got dominated by the opposition.
In their defense, the intense and in some ways unfair scrutiny LaVar’s sons are subject to is absolutely a byproduct of their father’s overbearing personality and has little to do with them as individuals, but it’s hard not to look at this video and see a selfish and oblivious young player who’s more concerned with chasing highlights and being cute than being a good teammate and playing to win.
Ironically enough, it was LaVar who was imploring his team to move the ball more during his half-time tirade, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise given that his older brother Lonzo is quite adept at setting up his teammates. LaMelo already has a rep for being showboat, which made his opponents and everyone on Twitter more than happy to oblige in taking him down a notch.
