LaVar Ball’s youngest Ball sons, LaMelo and LiAngelo, are shipping off to Lithuania on January 3rd to start their professional basketball careers. LaMelo and LiAngelo signed with first-division Lithuanian club, Vytautas Prienai, in early December after a Series of Unfortunate Events ended the family’s relationship with UCLA.
LaVar Ball’s original plan for Lonzo, LaMelo, and LiAngelo had the brothers all suiting up for UCLA before either getting drafted or signed by the Lakers to team up in Los Angeles. LaVar’s decision to homeschool LaMelo, and LiAngelo’s arrest on a UCLA trip to China, forced the Ball’s to change course, and if nothing else, the move has provided hoops fans everywhere with hours of mindless entertainment.
Shortly after the Ball’s signed with Vytautas Prienai, a mixture of first-hand reports and hilarious rumors started circulating regarding the new squad LaMelo and LiAngelo were heading to. One particularly interesting rumor was the claim that Virginijus Šeškus, their new head coach, would sell meat out of the trunk of his car after practice.
Šeškus later clarified this rumor, saying he doesn’t sell the meat necessarily, but that some of his players would request delicious meat from a store down the road, and that is why he had it in the trunk of his car after practice. The fact that this meat trunk story needed clarifying bodes well for the future hilarity of the Ball era in Lithuania. This is going to be great.
According to a report by Shams Charania of Yahoo Sports, LaMelo and LiAngelo will make their Lithuanian debut in a Baltic League game Jan. 9. Of course, it’s unclear how much, if any, playing time the Ball’s will get.
The good news is, just because the Ball’s are playing basketball thousands of miles away, it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to support the globe-trotting Big Baller Brand from the states. Charania is reporting that Amazon has locked in an exclusive deal to sell authentic Vytautas Prienai LaMelo and LiAngelo Ball jerseys as early as next month.
Vytautas will sell the jerseys exclusively on Amazon in early January, the first step toward marketing the brothers stateside, a team official told Yahoo Sports.
The team has shipped approximately 500 game jerseys — half LaMelo jerseys and half LiAngelo ones — to an Amazon warehouse in the U.S. and is expected to ship more to deliver late in the first week of January, the team official said. For Vytautas, LaMelo and LiAngelo have provided the branding to create marketing deals in Lithuania and the U.S.
Unfortunately, we don’t know how much an authentic Lithuanian league jersey is going to cost you, but this is a genuinely fun development. Don’t you think for a second that these won’t sell out, either. Big Baller Brand has a loyal customer base, but even without the Big Baller Brand army, obscure basketball jersey ownership is kind of a thing these days, and something about a LiAngelo and LaMelo Vytautas Prienai jersey seems desirable in a way I can’t exactly put into words.
