LaVar Ball turned down a reported $10 million Nike deal to launch Big Baller Brand for his sons instead. The execution was messy and the product quality poor, but the strategic bet to stay independent made sense. If built properly around LaMelo Ball, who became the family's NBA star, it could have worked.
There's a guy in the NBA who gets made fun of, which is this guy LaVar Ball. He has 3 sons, all 3 wanted to make it to the NBA, and this guy's this like loudmouth guy. They got like a reality show around them because they're sort of like basketball version of the Kardashians. There's 3 brothers, kind of an overbearing parent who is like protecting their business strategy. And when they were gonna get picked second in the draft and Nike offered him a contract, Adidas, and instead he created Big Baller Brand, you know, Triple B. He created his own shoe line, and like the shoes kind of sucked, and like, you know, he didn't have the full business plan, and people were making fun of him for like, oh wow, you turned down a guaranteed $10 million from Nike to like launch this thing. Actually, that was the right move. Now maybe his execution was slightly poor, but that was actually the right move. And a lot of these NBA players would have been better served had they done that themselves. And actually now that it would have worked because the youngest brother, he was kind of like a fuckboy a little bit. He had a gold, like a diamond grill, had like a Lambo at 15, and he was kind of off the reservation. He actually turned out to be the best one. He's actually a star player. And if they had kind of built it properly around him, it probably would have done a lot better.
