LaMelo Ball and the Brainrotted Human Spirit

"Lamelo...to himself...oh yeah," or; toward a theory of LaMelo Ball as the first great Zoomer athlete

Every time I see LaMelo Ball, it’s because he’s done something insane. Like: about halfway through the first quarter, while the Hornets were losing at home to the imploding Phoenix Suns (having scored only five points in the game’s first six minutes) LaMelo Ball did something so heartwarmingly insane that it cannot be banished from my mind’s eye. With more than half of the shot clock left, LaMelo attempted to break down Bradley Beal at the three point line; as he began this process, his similarly insane young teammate, Brandon Miller, who once claimed that Paul George was his “GOAT of basketball,” shaded in from LaMelo’s left to set a sort of ghost screen-and-roll. LaMelo stepped back as Miller’s man, Devin Booker, switched onto him. LaMelo was guarded, sure, but launching guarded stepback threes is sort of his whole thing, which makes what came next so delightfully surprising. Most players, upon seeing their defender leave his feet on a pump fake, would jump into the defender’s body to draw an aesthetically displeasing but statistically sound foul call; LaMelo, answering as he does to purer dictates than “efficiency” or “common sense,” contorted his body underneath the flying Booker and into the three-point area. As he leaped toward the free-throw line, LaMelo launched the ball off the backboard. A momentary breathlessness took hold over the arena, punctured by Kevin Durant realizing in real time what was transpiring. “What the fuck,” Durant yelled. LaMelo’s recklessness freezes every Sun defender in their tracks. He catches his own rebound and touch passes to a now-unguarded Miller at the baseline, who in turn drives and dumps an up-and-under pass to the waiting Mark Williams. As Williams is fouled by the recovering (and, for the record, also similarly insane) Mason Plumlee, the ecstatic announcer Eric Collins has both pieced together, and approved of, what has transpired: “Lamelo…to himself…OH YEAH. I LOVE IT. Fun basketball.”

Since the Brooklyn Nets squandered the greatest talent pairing in NBA history and clarified for me that organized sports are but one arm of a fascist propaganda machine meant solely to sell advertisements and embolden reactionary hordes in the Boston metro area, I have been forced to find a new personal justification for following professional basketball. LaMelo Ball, in his unbridled, untethered mania, has made this surprisingly easy. LaMelo plays basketball as if he were in the process of inventing a new, basketball-esque sport in real time; his creativity is endless, reckless, and at its best only tangentially in furtherance of winning games for his team. LaMelo’s game is unmistakably frivolous, but in as bleak a world as ours there is a sort of radical joy to be found in frivolity.

I have long struggled to articulate what precisely I adore about LaMelo’s unmoored, nonsensical game. For a while, I settled on labeling his style “nihilistic,” a term that traded precision for legibility. Lamelo-as-nihilist makes more sense coming from his detractors. Take friend of the blog (and co-host of the excellent new hoops podcast Nothing But Respect, which I’ve been on twice now, which episodes you should listen to, but really listen to all of them, they’re all good), Defector’s Patrick Redford, who saw in LaMelo’s recent antics not a glimmer of salvation but sheer bleakness: “This,” tweeted Patrick,” is dead-eyed, nihilistic blueberry mango vape hoops.” As best I can tell, though, Patrick’s real gripe is that LaMelo’s whole deal is “zoomer bullshit.”

Ock Klosterman with Ock Sportello

In an attempt to explain what LaMelo Ball’s antics mean to me, then, perhaps it will be necessary to advance a theory. It’s not that I disagree with Patrick that LaMelo is zoomer bullshit personified; I just think that’s a good thing. LaMelo, you see, is the platonic Zoomer hooper. Like any true messiah, he stepped into his role in something like a prophetic fulfillment. The Ball brothers, forced into the spotlight by their overbearing, bombastic, and ultimately vindicated father, exemplified a cohort of celebrities ascending to fame as the machines that created traditional millennial stardom came undone, in many ways modeling a sort of proto-2020s model of fame. But if the Ball family retained some level of knowability, their youngest, LaMelo, was a complete cipher. LaMelo was a Zoomer before the phrase quite existed; to watch him score 92 points in a high school basketball game, routinely drain half court shots like a broccoli-haired Babe Ruth, cherry-pick like an asthmatic old head, and dribble like Julian Newman was a sort of baptism by fire into the brainrotted world of Zoomer hegemony. It’s not really worth waxing poetic about LaMelo’s arc from Chino Hills to, inexplicably, Lithuania, Ohio, and Australia, because LaMelo is about as far from poetic as a talented athlete can be. Nor, for the record, is LaMelo’s style prosaic—it’s more that he defies the written word. Like any truly Gen Z phenomenon, LaMelo exists in the realm of the image, the clip, the reel, the loop. He is, and for as long as his life has been lived in public, always has been on some bullshit. My favorite highlight package of LaMelo’s, for instance, is an entirely off-court compilation of his pathological, reckless speeding out of the team garage and past a light that, for whatever reason, is always red.

But there is a risk, I fear, of making “zoomer” synonymous with “nihilist.” It’s easy to ascribe the generation with this particular affect. While home for Christmas recently I played Fortnite with my zoomer brother and watched Peter Griffin, wearing a Skibidi Toilet backpack, doing the griddy to NBA Youngboy after killing me with a shotgun; I am no stranger to the argument that the zoomer brain is fried beyond the point of holding or ascribing meaning. But the reason zoomers appear as nihilists en masse to the generations their senior has more to do, I suspect, with their generational clear-sightedness. Inextricable from the Gen Z experience is an acknowledgment that both the future and the systems leading us toward it are irredeemably cooked. From the outside looking in, this acknowledgment can look an awful lot like nihilism; for many, it manifests as nihilism plain and simple. But what LaMelo Ball models is that there is a way to recognize that the end is near that does not necessitate believing that nothing matters. All exemplary Zoomer art, from Xaviersobased and Nettspend and pluggnb and (forgive me) dariacore to LaMelo Ball spamming reverse 360 degree dribbles at the top of the key and then saying, of Kemba Walker, “I’m gang, he gang…I fuck with his family,” is necessarily about rejecting pre-existing, rapidly decaying value systems—something that can look an awful lot like the careless throwing up of hands. So, too, must this art be absurd in a way that can often be confused with stupidity. The beauty in great Zoomer art, though, is its ability to channel rot, despair, and hopelessness into a sort of maximalist affirmation. LaMelo, like any great Zoomer, teaches us that hopelessness need not be joylessness, that one can dance alongside the march of progress and throw up some bullshit seemingly designed in a lab to hospitalize any given member of the old guard with rage. If the alternative is an ever-intensifying, soul-deadening pursuit of homogenous efficiency, then there is a real, radical beauty in LaMelo’s compulsion to ignore any dictates beyond his own wish-fulfillment.

Or, to put it more concretely: we all know that the fucking Celtics are going to win the championship again anyway, and any time really spent sweating standings and outcomes and all of that stuff that we’ve come to understand as important in basketball is really doing nothing more than investing importance into a season that is obviously going to end in making the worst people happy, and what’s the harm, really, in rooting for the most charismatic and nonsensical players in the league to just throw up some of the craziest bullshit you have ever seen instead.