LaMelo Ball is an Idiot and a Savant
Might we have a phrase for this?
Good morning. If you’re like me, you spent dawn watching the wildly entertaining last 7:54 of the Warriors-Clippers play-in as announced by Nate Duncan and Danny Leroux.
To quote extemporaneous Nate:
They can’t win a championship anymore, but the level these two guys can summon, Draymond and Steph, in the biggest moments, still is incredible.
The Warriors are hard to watch in the regular season, because they’re clinging to the past, but exciting to watch in elimination scenarios, because the past sometimes gets a reprieve in the form of glorious resurrection.
Steph Curry and LeBron James are still the NBA’s biggest stars, with fame dating back to a monocultural era. But what of the future? As mentioned here, the NBA lacks plausible superstars on the level of these aging millennials.
Obviously new teams and powers have risen, but there’s nobody who threatens to transcend beyond the sport. Well actually, arguably, there’s one guy. The Warriors could have saved themselves by drafting this individual in 2020, but it was also hard to blame them back then for taking a pass.
Why? Because LaMelo Ball is an idiot. Actually the more precise term is “idiot savant.” That phrase has fallen out of fashion, at least when we’re describing a specific guy, but oh does it fit in this case. I say it here because apparently it’s controversial to say elsewhere, so the broader conversation sort of talks around this dichotomy. And it was funny to watch First Things First host Nick Wright get intense backlash for pronouncing of Ball, after he tripped and injured Bam Adebayo in Charlotte’s play-in victory:
That young man is a clown.
How dare anyone think that LaMelo Ball is clownish. Anyway, here’s a clip of him pondering the difficult question of which Thanksgiving food he likes.
LaMelo is both a fool and a genius, maybe more so than anyone else in professional sports. He’s accomplished the now rare professional athletic feat of being popular with kids, tethered somehow to his overlap with the 6-7 meme. The Charlotte Hornets have lost a lot since drafting him, but are dramatically worse when he sits. He plays inefficiently, while somehow proving that efficiency doesn’t matter. I’m not sure there’s anyone else quite like this in sports culture. You could potentially say Ball’s like a basketball Jake Paul in that he’s a tatted up and totally nuts Zoomer engagement magnet. I believe he’s a difficult subject to broach for one very specific reason though, connected to the out of fashion idea of “idiot savant.”