LaVar Ball May Have Cost Lonzo a $20 Million Sneaker Deal

Lonzo Ball was in line to receive a sneaker deal worth between $10 and $20 million, according to ESPN's Darren Rovell.

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By now, you’ve probably heard that LaVar Ball cost his son Lonzo a sneaker deal after meeting with several large shoe companies like Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour in April. He got roasted—and we do mean roasted—on social media for doing it. But do you know just how much LaVar cost Lonzo?

It’s hard to put an exact dollar amount on it, since its all speculation at this point. But on Tuesday, ESPN reporter Darren Rovell appeared on The Dan Patrick Show and revealed that he heard LaVar and Lonzo walked away from a sneaker deal worth at least $10 million over five years from one of the big sneaker companies. And now that it sounds like Lonzo will probably end up being drafted by the Lakers with the No. 2 overall pick in the 2017 NBA Draft, there’s a chance that deal could have ended up being worth twice as much as that. So in essence, LaVar may have cost Lonzo $20 million by botching the negotiations with Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour by insisting that one of the companies license the Ball family’s Big Baller Brand.

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If we know LaVar—and at this point, doesn’t it feel like we all know LaVar?—he’s not going to be all that broken up by this report. He was looking for a billion-dollar deal, not a million-dollar deal, when he first started talking with the sneaker companies, so $10 million is basically, like, $10 to him. But Rovell also reported that the Balls are only going to end up making about $200 on every pair of $495 Big Baller Brand sneakers that they sell, which means they’re going to have to sell a lot of pairs if they want to make up the $10 to $20 million they’ve lost.


In other LaVar news, he’s also currently trying to score some free BBB sneakers for his AAU team—the AAU team that got destroyed by more than 50 points the other day—by making a bet with Ice Cube. Cube recently challenged LaVar to try and hit one of the 4-point shots that will be allowed in the new Big 3 league Cube has started. And LaVar responded by challenging him right back and saying that he’ll take part in a shootout with Cube if Cube agrees to buy his whole AAU team BBB sneakers if he loses to LaVar:

Cube doesn’t look like he has too much to worry about.

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