The time for griping about LaVar Ball pulling LiAngelo Ball and LaMelo Ball out of UCLA and Chino Hills High School, respectively, is over. Lonzo Ball’s younger brothers have officially signed with Prienu Vytautas, and will head to Lithuania in early January to play basketball and, presumably, rep the Big Baller Brand.
The Cons
On its face, there is plenty of reason to worry about what does and doesn’t await Gelo and Melo in Eastern Europe. The two teenagers will leave behind their cloistered life in Chino Hills for the town of Prienai (population: 10,000), where the language, culture and food will be nothing like they have ever known.
The coaching situation also figures to be anything but a breeze for the Ball boys. Though Virginijus Šeškus, the coach of BC Prienai, has been described as “the LaVar Ball of Lithuania,” that doesn’t mean LiAngelo and LaMelo will be able to relate to him, let alone play for him.
Billy Baron—who competed at Virginia, Rhode Island and Canisius before playing for Šeškus at Lietuvos rytas in 2014-15—attested to the coach’s tendencies.
“I couldn’t really give you anything bad on him except for the fact he doesn’t speak English,” Baron told HoopsHype’s Bryan Kalbrosky. “He runs the club they signed for, so it’s a different situation than mine. He can do what he wants there.”
That said, the intense pressure on Šeškus to win in order to keep his job could work against giving significant minutes to Gelo and Melo, both of whom will likely require a divestment of resources from the club (i.e. time, attention, energy) to get them up to speed.
Not that there will be much practice time at BC Prienai to begin with.
“Where I was, he actually got fired after a 20-point win, so that speaks to the pressure he was under,” Baron added. “Lithuanian basketball is extremely physical though, would love to see their faces when they get hit with one of those screens.”
Should one of said screens cause an injury to Gelo or Melo, Vytautas might not have the proper training and medical staff to tend to their wounds. That, in turn, would work against LaVar’s “master plan” to get all of his sons on the Los Angeles Lakers.
Stylistically speaking, the run-and-gun Ball brothers seem an odd fit in a country where, according to ESPN’s Mike Schmitz, “Players are known for their strong feel for the game and discipline.”
The Pros
But BC Prienai is no ordinary Lithuanian team, and Šeškus no ordinary coach. That much should be clear for the former based on the club’s eagerness to not only use the Ball boys as a “commercial project,” but admit as much publicly.
As for the coaching, while Šeškus may or may not be insane, his basketball philosophy appears to be aligned with LaVar’s. For one, his team recently set a Lithuanian League record for three-point attempts in a game (42).
And as a knowledgable source told ESPN’s Jeff Goodman, Vytautas’ tendencies to mix players positionally, jack up threes and relax on defense make Gelo and Melo’s arrival “a perfect match.”
Off-court arrangements need not be a deterrent, either. If the Ball boys choose to stay in and around Prienai, they can shack up at the Vytautas Mineral Spa in the nearby resort town of Birstonas.
And if those accommodations grow stale, they can plant their BBB flag in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city.
Either way, this has the makings of the weirdest study-abroad program ever, basketball-related or otherwise. Thanks to Facebook Watch’s “Ball in the Family,” it all figures to be caught on camera and shown to the masses.
And isn’t that the biggest “pro” of all? That the world will get some entertainment value out of LaVar’s latest—and, perhaps, greatest—experiment?
