After months of quiet, undisturbed slumber, the Big Baller Brand giant has awoken once again.
Appearing on the Doug & Wolf Show, a morning sports talk radio show on 98.7 FM in Arizona, LaVar Ball unloaded on the Los Angeles Lakers and head coach Luke Walton on Tuesday, just a day after informing ESPN that he’d prefer Lonzo to be traded to the Phoenix Suns instead of the New Orleans Pelicans if he’s included as part of a package for Anthony Davis.
Andrew Joseph of For The Win has a lengthy transcription of the appearance available, and the highlights include Ball insisting the Lakers gave Lonzo “that losing attitude” and that it would somehow be fixed by him going to the Suns. Yeah.
“The Lakers gave my boy that losing attitude,” Ball said. “If you look at my boys, the one thing they do do is win. My boys don’t lose too much. When he got to the Lakers — Luke Walton was the worst coach ever for Lonzo because he had a losing mentality. They’ve been losing for three years. That’s how you develop losing.”
Ball went on to bemoan the amount of players the Lakers have handling the rock, and attributing Lonzo’s struggles in LA to Walton’s resistance to let Lonzo do what he does best, taking shots at some of Lonzo’s teammates in the process.
“Why is it not working in L.A.? Because Lonzo, he makes everybody better,” Ball said. “How can you make somebody better if you have four people dribbling the ball up the court? You don’t even hear of Kuzma if Lonzo don’t make him in the Las Vegas Summer League. You see every time Kuzma plays by himself? Hart, Ingram by himself? They don’t get nothing. They look raggedy.”
But perhaps the true highlight of the entire interview is Ball’s dream to have all three of his sons reunite in Phoenix, thus guaranteeing the Suns a championship.
“We’ll change the whole culture over there,” Ball said.
The patriarch of the Ball family made it almost to All-Star without so much as a peep about the Lakers, but it seems he’s resigned himself to Lonzo’s fate at the trade deadline and decided to burn some bridges before a deal was even done. If, as the Lakers seem to believe, the Pelicans don’t make a trade with them by Thursday, it will be interesting to see how the team and Lonzo react to playing out the year following LaVar’s scorched earth plan on Arizona radio.
