LaMelo Ball can be hard to take seriously. He treats the streets of Charlotte like Rainbow Road and makes incomprehensible decisions on what to tattoo onto his body; he’s the Lisan Al-Ghaib for teenagers with TikTok haircuts. Despite being just 23 years old, he’s been a weird kind of internet famous for nearly a decade, lending the sense that he’s not a real person. Just try to imagine LaMelo Ball going to the dentist or buying paper towels. When he calls himself an alien, you’re inclined to believe him.
But despite (because of?) all his hijinks and foibles, Ball is thrilling. As the scion of basketball’s loudest family, Ball is the most inventive passer in the league; watch him long enough and you’ll see him chain dribble moves that you never imagined to create a window for a pass that you never considered. To him, basketball is fundamentally an act of creation.
While Ball has always been a lyrical playmaker, his scoring can be disappointingly flat. Even if he’s outgrown his high school habit of spasming and flailing like he’d suddenly sneezed whenever he shot, his first four seasons were plagued by a certain lackadaisical arrogance. He missed layups that he should’ve made; he flung threes that he never should’ve taken. His True Shooting percentage never peeped above league-average. To this point, his scoring was largely incidental, a manifestation of his usage rather than his utility. In each of the last two seasons, Ball averaged the fewest points of any player who averaged more than 19 shots per game.
This year, though, he’s been able to shepherd his considerable gifts—elite positional size and touch; a congenital immunity to shame or censure—into actual production. Through eight games, he’s averaging 28.1 points per game on 60.4 percent True Shooting, both career highs. For the first time, he seems to understand how each part of his game builds upon the others. As such, he’s aggressively hunting shots off the dribble, hoisting nearly 40 percent of his league-high 11.8 threes per game. By taking and making so many threes, he, in turn, unstops the paint, allowing him to shoot 54.5 percent on twos, yet another personal high water mark.
Beyond simply being a better player this year, Ball is crucially a different kind of player—he looks like a fairly standard-issue elite guard. Whereas he once engendered a uniquely chaotic system, he’s now so ball-dominant that he is the system, leading the NBA with a 36.4 percent usage rate while the Hornets play at a below-average pace. Without him, the Hornets succumb to entropy: when Ball is on the bench, the Hornets’ offense is faster, but also 20.5 points per 100 possessions worse.
In this sense, Ball has added substance but dimmed his sparkle. Just because he can play like a conventional primary ball-handler doesn’t mean that he should. The inherent promise of Ball has been that he’s a Rare One—there are lots of players who can stylishly average lots of points on bad teams, but Ball is special in the ways that his talents can alchemize those of his teammates, that he can turn scum like Miles Bridges into a scum bucket. And yet, this year, he’s shined his light inward. It’s not a coincidence that his best scoring season is shaping up to be his worst playmaking one—his 6.0 assists per game are the fewest of his career and his 5.0 turnovers are the most.
As the Hornets try to excavate themselves from years of badness and criminality, they must decide what kind of team they want to be. Outside of Ball, sophomore wing Brandon Miller is their other foundational player. But during their short time as teammates, the two have never developed any meaningful connection, in large part because they’ve hardly played together. Ball was sidelined last spring when Miller emerged from his rookie pupal stage; Miller has been gimpy to start this season. Accordingly, in Miller’s 2,043 Ball-less minutes, he’s scored 27.9 points per 100 possessions, compared to just 20.8 points in his 433 Ball-full ones. There’s no reason that Miller and Ball should be incompatible, besides the fact that Charlotte hasn’t given them time to locate any natural compatibility.
In this quest for respectability, Charlotte has leaned on Ball’s limitless imagination to compensate for their lack thereof. When Ball is in the game, they grant him complete control. When he’s not, they twiddle their thumbs and sing little songs to themselves until he checks back in again. In leaning so heavily on one player, the Hornets have created an environment that doesn’t leave much space for anyone else; tellingly, no other starter averages even 15 points per game.
For Ball to fully convert his superstar promise into true-blue superstardom, he’ll need to find ways to moderate between his two extremes. In his second year, his looseness fueled the Hornets to their best season since 2016, until his profligacy doomed them to an embarrassing play-in ass-kicking. Now, his total individual mastery seems unable to uplift a listless team. Eventually, there’s hope that Ball can become some sort of evolutionary Steve Nash, an all-world bandleader who can coax melody from a roaring wall of sound, but Charlotte has currently boxed him in as a soloist. For the Hornets, this version of Ball is life, but is it really living?
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