LaMelo Ball ranked No. 12 on The Step Back's 2023-24 25-under-25, ranking the best young players in the NBA. Check out the rest of the list here.
Prior to the New England Patriots 2020 AFC Wildcard clash against the Tennessee Titans (the final game their legendary quarterback played with them), Tom Brady tweeted an inspirational hype video to set the mood. It is linked below.
"This lion, he's the king of the jungle. He's lying down under a tree. He doesn't want to move," the video's narrator says. "Now, the other animals, they notice this is, and they start to move in. Their jackals, hyenas – they're barking at him, laughing at him. And they get closer and closer and bolder and bolder. Until one day, that lion gets up and tears the shit out of everybody – runs like the wind, eats everything in its path. Because every once in a while, the lion has to show the jackals who he is."
Let's hone in on that last part for a second, "Because every once in a while, the lion has to show the jackals who he is." This (admittedly cheesy) statement exemplifies the theme heading into LaMelo Ball's fourth season in the league.
After being tapped as an All-Star replacement during his sophomore season, Ball's junior year was plagued by injuries to himself (he played just 36 games) and many of his supporting castmates. Injuries that apparently led some folks to forget how good he is.
Now, this isn't an attempt to denigrate anyone's opinion. Ranking players is as laborious of an endeavor as they come. However, great professional athletes (Ball is one of them) know how to use anything as motivation. And Ball will surely be using his fourth season in the league to remind us all who he is.
If Ball wasn't in the NBA, he'd probably be P.T. Barnum's understudy. Ball is a basketball player by trade, but he's a showman at heart. His main act is racing up and down the hardwood and dishing out dimes like he was a coin machine.
Ben Taylor has a metric called Passer Rating that measures a player's passing prowess on a scale of 1-10. You think LeBron James is a great passer, right? He didn't surpass the eight mark in this metric until his seventh season. Ball has only played three years in the NBA, and he's already reached that threshold. And the best part he did that in his rookie season! He's had a Passer Rating over eight each of his first three years. Last season, he posted a Passer Rating of 8.8 (98th percentile).
Ball isn't just an adept deliverer of the basketball. He's great at creating high-value shots for his teammates. The most efficient live-ball shot you can take is one at the rim. Ball isn't a great rim finisher, but he creates plenty of opportunities for others to do his bidding.
Ball is already such a talented passer and playmaker that he doesn't need another creator next to him to babysit him. If you're a general manager, all you have to do is surround him with athletic wings, forwards, and bigs who can rip and run with him (which they've done), and you have the recipe for efficient offense.
For the most part, the Charlotte Hornets offense was horrid last season. Overall, they had the worst offensive rating in the league last year. But when Ball was on the floor, he improved their offense by 5.9 points per 100 possessions (89th percentile, per Cleaning the Glass).
Ball can operate as the solo captain of the ship, but heliocentrism isn't an absolute necessity with him. Prior to the 2023 NBA Draft, there was some discourse going around that the Hornets couldn't select Scoot Henderson because he wouldn't fit alongside Ball. The good ole "There's just one ball!" argument (no pun intended). And while Brandon Miller will surely be a good fit next to him, that statement just isn't the case.
Forget for a second that you need multiple creators to make deep playoff runs. Ball also has shooting indicators that would suggest that he could take on more of an off-ball role. Over the last three years, Ball has shot 41 percent on catch-and-shoot 3s (a common off-ball play type). That puts him in the 84th percentile league-wide during that time (per thinkingbasketball.net).
On top of that, his current teammate, Terry Rozier, likes to play with the ball in his hands. And when they've shared the court in the last three years, Ball's true shooting percentage is higher (56.2) than when he's playing without Rozier (51.9). So, contrary to public sentiment, he actually looked better when having another ball-handler by his side.
One thing that no one seems to be talking about is how good the Hornets were defensively after the All-Star break. According to Cleaning the Glass, they finished seventh in Defensive Rating after the All-Star break, with a rating (113.0) that was 3.3 points per 100 possessions lower than the league average (remember, when it comes to defense, the lower the rating, the better).
Head coach Steve Clifford has installed a great defensive infrastructure in Charlotte, something the team has been sorely lacking over the last few years. And while Ball only participated in three games after the break, his positional length and defensive intellect (great passers usually make for great help defenders) will help him play his part in Clifford's newfound brigade.
A healthy Ball with shooting and athleticism around him is almost a guaranteed top-10 offense. And if the Hornets can continue their momentum from the second half of the season, they have a chance to flirt with top-10 on the other side of the ball, too.
Historically speaking, teams with that kind of balance tend to fare pretty well in the regular season and playoffs. And if Ball can guide a legitimate playoff team, let's just say the jackals and hyenas who doubted him will be running for their lives.