Bear with me.
You might think a story with LaVar Ball, LaMelo Ball, and Lonzo Ball as the main characters all must have happened a decade ago, but the following saga really did unfold over the past 24 hours.
Charlotte Hornets All-Star guard LaMelo Ball was the hero for sinking a game-winning layup with 4.7 seconds left in overtime to propel the Hornets over the Miami Heat in their Play-In Tournament game on Tuesday night.
But the main takeaway from the game was Ball tripping and injuring Miami Heat All-Star Bam Adebayo.
Adebayo suffered a lower back injury on the play and was lost for the rest of the game. Ball was not called for a foul, but on Wednesday, the NBA retroactively assessed a flagrant 2 and fined Ball $35,000 for “unnecessary and reckless contact” with Adebayo. He was also fined $25,000 for cursing on the Prime Video broadcast.
On Wednesday’s episode of FS1’s “First Things First,” Nick Wright criticized Ball, saying, in part, “That young man is a clown.”
Lonzo Ball, LaMelo’s older brother and the No. 2 overall pick in the 2017 NBA Draft, posted to X, “Nick Wright a bum! [Clown emoji].”
LaVar Ball defended his youngest son from the set of the “Big Baller” podcast.
“Has Nick Wright ever looked in the mirror?” the Ball family patriarch said. “I bet if you look in the dictionary right now, and you look up ‘clown,’ you’re gonna see two things. One, it’s gonna be somebody with some long hair and a big [expletive] nose. Yup, that’s Nick Wright.”
Contrary to LaVar Ball’s belief, there is no photo of Wright next to the word “clown” in the dictionary. But if you looked up at your television screen during “First Things First” on Thursday afternoon, you did see Wright dressed as a clown.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I say,” Wright said at the top of the show while crossing his huge clown shoes on the table.
Wright took off his rainbow clown wig, red clown nose, and clown shoes after the show’s opening segment.
On Thursday morning, Wright more seriously addressed the backlash to his LaMelo Ball criticism on his “What’s Wright?” podcast.
“It appears I have underestimated how offensive for some folks being called a clown is,” Wright said, in part. “Maybe that is my own numbing of my sensibilities by the fact that I get called a clown all the time, and it doesn’t really bother me. […] I have never looked at ‘clown’ as some third rail, almost slur-adjacent term.”
Wright stood by his assessment that Ball has behaved immaturely throughout his NBA career, but he wished he hadn’t said that Ball “will never not be a clown” because “nobody is one thing forever.”
Ball, 24, was drafted by the Hornets with the third overall pick in 2020. This season, Ball averaged 20.1 points, 7.1 assists, 4.8 rebounds, and 1.2 steals across 72 games for the 44-38 Hornets.
Charlotte is on the precipice of making the NBA playoffs for the first time since the 2015-16 season if the Hornets can beat the Orlando Magic in their second Play-In game on Friday night. The winner of that game will face the top-seeded Pistons in the Eastern Conference first round of the NBA playoffs, beginning on Saturday.