LaMelo Ball, the point guard Charlotte traded just as it started winning

LaMelo Ball

Photo: Fox Life Visuals / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 22, 2001 Chino Hills
Occupation	Basketball Player
Individual awards	NBA Rookie of the Year · NBA All-Star · NBA All-Rookie First Team · NBL Rookie of the Year

Charlotte spent six seasons arranging a franchise around LaMelo Ball, and the season it finally looked like a team worth arranging was the season it let him go. The Hornets more than doubled their win total with their point guard on the floor most nights, won a postseason game for the first time in a decade on his late layup, and then sent him to Minnesota in a four-team trade. The question now following him into the Western Conference is whether the most improvisational passer of his generation is a player you build around or a player you add to something already built.

The Timberwolves have bet on the second answer. They already had Anthony Edwards, the scorer who carried them to back-to-back conference finals, and they want Ball to take the ball out of his hands so that Edwards can work without it. Two of the top three picks from the same draft now share one backcourt. Edwards has said publicly that he expects growing pains in their first year together.

Ball was born in Anaheim, California, on August 22, 2001, the youngest of three sons of LaVar and Tina Ball, both former college players, and grew up in Chino Hills, where his father drilled the boys almost from the moment they could walk. As a freshman at Chino Hills High School he played beside his brothers Lonzo and LiAngelo on a team that went 35-0 and won the California Open Division state title. A season later he scored 92 points in one game against Los Osos, the second-highest total in state high school history, and drew as much criticism for how he got them, loitering near half court instead of defending, as praise for the number.

The family then took a route no elite American prospect had taken. LaVar pulled him out of Chino Hills in 2017 after a dispute with the school’s new coach, and that December Ball and LiAngelo signed with Prienai in Lithuania, reportedly making him the youngest American ever to sign a professional basketball contract. It went badly. His coach, Virginijus Šeškus, called him a “little chipmunk”, he shot under 27 percent, and the family left in the spring with LaVar blaming the coach. Ball spent the summer of 2018 in the Junior Basketball Association, a league his father created, and his senior year at SPIRE Institute in Ohio. A signature shoe from the family’s Big Baller Brand, an agent and a paycheck had by then closed the door to UCLA, the school he had committed to at 13.

Australia rescued the project. Through the NBL’s Next Stars program he joined the Illawarra Hawks for the 2019-20 season and, once an injury sidelined veteran point guard Aaron Brooks, became the youngest player in league history to record a triple-double, then posted another in his next game. A bruised foot ended his season after 12 games, and he was named NBL Rookie of the Year anyway. Scouts who had once filed him as a second-round gamble were now arguing about whether he should go first.

Charlotte took him third in the 2020 draft, making him and Lonzo the first brothers both chosen in the top three. He won Rookie of the Year despite a fractured wrist, became the youngest player at the time to post an NBA triple-double, and was an All-Star in his second season, when he averaged 20.1 points and 7.6 assists. In July 2023 the Hornets gave him a five-year rookie maximum extension worth more than $200 million, the largest contract in franchise history.

The doubts were never about talent. Ball fractured his right ankle in February 2023 and spent much of the next two seasons in and out of the lineup; when the Associated Press previewed his first Minnesota season it counted 303 appearances out of a possible 482 regular-season games. Even his best scoring year, 25.2 points a game in 2024-25 with a 50-point night against Milwaukee, ended in March with procedures on an ankle and a wrist. That November the league fined him $100,000 for saying “no homo” in a postgame interview, language it called “offensive and derogatory”. And the defining image of his last spring in Charlotte cut both ways: the winning layup against Miami in the play-in, and the swipe at Bam Adebayo’s ankle earlier that night that left the Heat center with a back injury. The NBA later called the play “unnecessary and reckless”, ruled it a flagrant 2 that should have meant an ejection, and fined him $35,000.

That spring was also the strongest case for him. Healthy for 72 games, he averaged 20.1 points and 7.1 assists and made 272 three-pointers, one fewer than rookie teammate Kon Knueppel; they were the first teammates since Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson to make at least 270 each. Coach Charles Lee even brought him off the bench for a January game against Indiana, the first time since his rookie season, and Ball answered with 33 points. Charlotte went from 19 wins to 44 and won its first postseason game since 2016 before Orlando eliminated it in the next play-in game.

The trade was reported on June 25 and completed on July 10, after it grew into a four-team deal involving Chicago and Brooklyn. Ball, who still had three years left on his contract, went to Minnesota with Josh Green; Charlotte received forward Naz Reid, a former Sixth Man of the Year, and draft compensation. His Timberwolves debut, on October 21 in Miami, was a 131-106 win in which Edwards scored 45 and Ball added 21 points and six assists, a fair sketch of the arrangement Minnesota wants.

Off the court he has lived in public since his teens, first through the family’s Facebook Watch series Ball in the Family and later through a Puma deal signed in 2021. In May he and his partner Analicia Chaves, known online as Ana Montana, announced that their son, LaOne, had been born in January, and launched I Am Fertility, a nonprofit for women going through fertility treatment and IVF.

Minnesota’s bet is specific. If Ball stays on the floor, the Wolves get a point guard who moves the ball before defenses set and a second creator who frees Edwards from carrying every possession; if he does not, they have traded one of the league’s best reserves for a player whose seasons have too often ended in a training room. The first measure will not be his assists. It will be how many of the 82 games he is there for.

Tags: sports, athletes, nba, basketball players, Anthony Edwards, LaMelo Ball, Minnesota Timberwolves

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