LaVar Ball has no doubts about when he thinks his 19-year-old son, LaMelo, will be selected in the upcoming 2020 NBA draft. “He’s gonna go No. 1,” the elder, and always audacious, Ball says. “You can say what you want, but you take the most skilled and the most popular [player].”
But this year, with the draft process uprooted by the COVID-19 pandemic, LaVar, who has now raised a second likely top-five pick, has been relatively quiet, at least by his standards. Gone are the bold comparisons that he made in 2017, when he said, among other proclamations, that his oldest son, Lonzo, was already better than Warriors star Stephen Curry.