The importance of it goes beyond just the meaning. Maybe beyond basketball. We’ll have to wait and see.
To say he needed this more than we did might be an understatement but, at the same time, be comparably inaccurate. While it’s his life and his career, it has been our reoccurrence, our haunting. Wait and see. Something that had been his life for the last 1,006 days. Since the last time he officially donned a Bulls uniform. Even as we watched him set Protro on the court and the counting stopped for him, we continued.
One thousand seven, 1,008, 1,009, 1,010, 1,011, 1,012, 1,013.
Stop. Game 1 of the 2024-25 season. The reset. Lonzo Ball, if all blessings remain intact, officially re-enters the NBA. Not to finish what was started in 2021 but to put catastrophe and chaos behind him, leaving us to figure out where to put his rebirth into our expectancies.
The sentiment steeped in his return is palpable, if mildly put. The skip to the baseline. The bend and the grabbing of the base of his shorts in front of the Bulls’ bench. Standing on FanDuel. Tim Sinclair’s voice announcing his number and name. The raising of both arms in the air, to the heavens. Acknowledging the acknowledgment. The standing ovation from the crowd and his teammates.
The best of our love to him. Emotions. The Tom & Jerry and Vince McMahon and Michael Gary Scott crying memes and GIFs on Twitter/X. So apropos. Wednesday can’t come soon enough.
In his 35-game on-court career for the Bulls, he has averaged 13 points, 5.4 rebounds, 5.1 assists and 1.8 steals. While, for the analytics geeks, shooting 42.3% from the field and 42.3% from three. Which means nada to the role and impact he played in shaping whom the Bulls were when he left the court.
DeMar DeRozan averaging damn near 30 points a game. Zach LaVine averaging damn near 25. Billy Donovan looking like a Coach of the Year candidate. That pre-MLK Day game will go down in infamy in the history of Chicago basketball. Very similar, but far less drastic, heartbreaking or attached, to the 4/28/2012 day that ended Derrick Rose as Chicago knew him.
The Bulls’ record was 27-13 at the time. Fourteen games above .500. First place in the East. Ahead of the Nets with Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden (before that whole plan went sideways); ahead of the defending champion Bucks; ahead of the Heat, whom later that season were one game away from going to the NBA Finals; ahead of the Celtics, the Eastern Conference representatives in the Finals. Those Bulls had one of the best defenses in the league. That’s how good they were. Then.
Then it all fell apart. Quickly and for an unusually long period of time. Seasons passed. The tunnel had an opening, but there was no light at the end of it. The darkness that took over the team and organization in light of Ball’s prognosis also crept into him. Fighting quietly, fervently, desperately to figure out with medical teams and specialists what in the Greg Oden hell was going on. The answers didn’t help because, for the most part, they were all inconclusive. Three surgeries, a bone allograft and a cartilage transplant in his left knee later, here we are.
Now his past becomes our present. The window on what was supposed to be this team when Ball arrived has closed. Everything at this point moving forward anew. His journey masking itself as a metaphor: the saga of another seemingly jinxed Bulls player hoping not to ruin the team while his own circumstances are ruining him.
We fight not to allow that to happen. Learning this time not to hold Ball’s injuries against him the way we did someone else. The showering of grace from game to game hopefully will exorcise both his and our demons to the Pistons or the Pacers. Seems like, feels like we’ve been waiting on this as long as he has. While Lonzo went through the literal pain, we, contemptuously, took on the figurative.
What it means is that, while not over, this chapter in the history of the Bulls is complete. That horizon staring back at us, while uncertain, is a fresh outlook. One driven with tempered optimism.
One, two, three, four . . . a new count. Days since Lonzo Anderson Ball has missed a game. We only can wish, collectively pray, wait, see.
Ball or fall? Been there, survived it. Now all our adopted prodigal has to do is find his next self. And sustain supreme conviction that the basketball gods are nicer to him than they were the last point guard we put all of our faith in.