#Australian-based NBL professional league. basketball news

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LaMelo Ball bought the Australian basketball team he played for. How?

Photo by Anthony Au-Yeung/Getty Images

How did LaMelo Ball buy his former pro team in Australia?

LaMelo Ball may be the first pick in the 2020 NBA Draft, but the 18-year-old point guard apparently has bigger ambitions than merely starting his NBA career. Ball has purchased the Illwara Hawks, the Australia-based team in the NBL he played with this past season, according to ESPN.

Ball made the purchase with his manager Jermaine Jackson, a former player who competed professionally between 1999-2012 with several stints in the NBA. ESPN reports that financial issues were threatening the Hawks before Ball and Jackson’s purchase.

Ball is set to enter the NBA draft after playing 13 games with the Hawks before a season-ending foot injury. The 6’6 guard was already famous before he arrived in Australia via the league’s Next Stars program. Ball first gained notoriety as a freshman at Chino Hills high school where he played alongside his older brothers Lonzo and LiAngelo. Ball left the school ahead of his junior year in a highly-publicized move to turn pro in Lithuania, before returning to American high school ball at Ohio’s Spire Academy as a senior.

Ball’s performance in the NBL was strong enough to have him projected as the No. 1 overall pick in our most recent mock draft.

Ball’s career has already been a wild ride before he ever plays an NBA game, and buying a pro team in Australia is his most audacious move yet. How did this come to happen? This is everything we know about Ball’s purchase of his former club.

How much do NBL teams go for?

While we don’t know how much Ball bought the team for yet, there are several reports from recent years about the values of other teams in the league.

Brisbane Bullets were on the market for between $5 million and $10 million, according to Financial Review. Melbourne United was reportedly sold for $10 million.

The entire league, according to Financial Review, sold for $7 million to Larry Kestelman in 2015.

How much money has Ball made so far?

Though Ball is only 18 years old, he’s already had several revenue streams for a few years.

His NBL contract doesn’t appear to be public, but ESPN has previously reported players were paid at least $78K through the NextStars program. Ball has also starred in his family’s Ball in the Family reality show, which is broadcast on Facebook, and has had more than 100 episodes over five seasons. Ball also has 5.2 million Instagram followers, which can be another way to make money.

Ball is also about to make a lot more money once he enters the NBA.

How much is Ball looking to make in the NBA?

Zion Williamson earned a guaranteed $44 million as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2019 NBA Draft with the safe assumption that the two option years on the back end of his deal are picked up. The No. 5 pick in last year’s draft, Darius Garland, has about $29 million guaranteed over four years.

As an expected top-five pick, Ball can anticipate his first NBA deal will somewhere within that range. But his real money-making opportunity early in his career could be in endorsements.

Nike reportedly has interest in signing Ball to an endorsement deal. An unnamed sneaker company offered Ball $100 million and a private jet, according to USA Today. It’s too soon to know what Ball’s first major endorsement deal will an apparel company will look like, but his name recognition and fame should mean he sees a bigger deal than most rookies get.

Ball also recently bought a race horse

Remember when Ball bought a race horse that he named LaMelo? Just thought we’d mention that.

More from Jermaine Jackson, on LaMelo Ball shutting it down: “He’s gonna rehab and pay more attention to his race horse,” he tells me via text. He then sent me this photo. How good. pic.twitter.com/XnasUT7k3X

— Olgun Uluc (@OlgunUluc) January 16, 2020

Ball hopes to continue bringing top American prospects to Australia

Ball wasn’t the only former top high school recruit who chose to head to the NBL rather than play college basketball. R.J. Hampton was another five-star prospect who signed a contract with the New Zealand Breakers and is expected to be a lottery pick in the 2020 draft.

Ball and Jackson are betting that American players will want to follow Ball’s path through Australia before arriving in the NBA. This is what Jackson told ESPN:

“When high school kids hear LaMelo owns the team, they will want to come,” Jackson said. “They’ll know they will be taken care of. We’re going to put the organization on steroids, building it into a program that guys want to play for. I’m in touch with several former NBA GMs that want to go there to help out and high-level coaches that won every championship you can imagine.”

Ball’s arrival in the NBL helped the league set several viewership and attendance records. The head of the league said the NBL received $1.4 billion in global media deals after Ball joined.

Given how quickly NBA franchises have jumped in value in recent years, it’s possible Ball and Jackson got a good deal on a long-term investment if Ball’s presence can help the league take off. This is just another chapter in Ball’s unprecedented journey to the NBA as a teenager.

[humansofjcuhealth]

Med 20 years - Where are they now: Dr Chris Ball

Dr Chris Ball is a Townsville-based sports doctor for North Queensland’s Cowboys rugby league team and for the Australian national rugby league team, the Kangaroos. He was also part of the first cohort of JCU medicine students 20 years ago and holds the official title of being the first ever graduate of JCU Medicine.

I was the first ever to graduate from JCU Medicine because alphabetically my surname ‘Ball’ was called out first on the graduation rollcall. Being part of the first cohort was tough going at times but also exciting. You see all the magnificent buildings on campus now, but back then, for the first six months at least, we were all in a single room at the bottom of the library due to the floods that happened just before we started. There were about 65 of us crammed into that little room, thinking ‘is this for real?’, but then we soon moved over to the new facilities that were almost too big for us, and we just filled them out from then on.

I didn’t see going to a new medical school as being a risk, I saw it as a great opportunity as it meant I could stay local. Staying on in Townsville after I graduated has also given me a whole host of experiences that I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere else.

I have been very fortunate to get exposure to a lot of sports medicine early on in my medicine career. At one point I was helping with four professional teams, not only the Cowboys NRL, but Townsville used to have the Crocodiles basketball NBL team, the Fire Women’s basketball NBL team and Northern Fury soccer NPL team all based here. So there was quite a lot of sports medicine experience you could get if you put your hand up for it. Whereas if I was based say in Sydney, I would have had to join the line to help with just one team.

I am also the founding doctor of a Townsville-based primary care sports medicine clinic, Sports Clinic NQ. Working in sports medicine is great as your patient demographic always generally want to do everything they can to get better, the buy-in is exceptional. I’ve also had some incredible standout moments in my career. I’ve participated in the NFL Concussion Think Tank in New York and was on the field when the Cowboys won the grand final in 2015. Most notably though, in 2013 when Australia won the Rugby League World Cup, I was with the Kangaroos as their doctor, joining in the player’s circle as they sang their victory song, on one of the UK’s oldest and most well-known sporting fields, the Old Trafford in Manchester.