Inside Lonzo Ball's unprecedented 1,000-day return to the NBA
THE OPERATIONS TEAM at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport knows how to handle snow. With more than 250 pieces of snow removal equipment, the team can clear paths in even the most difficult conditions for the planes to keep flying. Chicago Bulls guard Lonzo Ball headed to the airport in the middle of one of those storms. Light rain earlier in the day had turned to snow. Wind gusts approached 20 mph. It was the afternoon of Feb. 16, 2023.
Over the All-Star break, Ball had decided to fly to Salt Lake City to undergo a nerve-block procedure to cut off the pain signals piercing through his knee. He arrived early to give himself time to walk to his gate. Everything he did took extra time. Stairs, escalators, security checkpoints. Carrying his luggage.
The plane was scheduled to take off for the nearly three-hour flight at 7:35 p.m. Shortly before, Ball boarded with the other passengers, only to deplane when a flight attendant announced the plane had mechanical issues. Ball stayed at the gate, waiting for updates. Hours went by. He lay down on the cold, carpeted O'Hare floor, headphones in. He tried to stay patient. If his long, frustrating rehab journey had taught him anything, it was that getting upset doesn't get you anywhere faster.
After a few more hours, he reboarded the plane with the hope Chicago's famed snow removal team would clear a runway. Another hour passed before a flight attendant announced it wasn't safe to take off. Everyone deplaned -- again.
At 9 a.m. the next day, the flight finally took off. Ball wasn't on it.
"Looking back at it," he told ESPN, "it was a blessing I didn't do it."
Instead of flying to Utah for the nerve block, Ball rerouted to Los Angeles to come up with a new plan. He wanted to play basketball again. But at this point, he had a simpler goal: He just wanted to be able to walk his dog and play with his daughter.
After more than a year of rehabilitation from what was originally thought to be a minor knee injury, he was further from the court than ever. His knee still throbbed when he went up or down stairs. Anything resembling running was excruciating. And most troubling of all, his latest MRI looked worse than when he first got hurt.
He was 400 days into a recovery that was supposed to last fewer than 60.
"I had literally had a surgery where they just, just cut my leg open to see what was going on. Just a search and rescue," Ball said of a September 2022 procedure. "Once that happened, I was like, 'I'm not doing this anymore. I need to set a goal ... [get everyone] on the call and come up with a plan."
He had already undergone two surgeries, MRIs, injections, and months and months of grueling, painful, unproductive rehab. Pain continued to ping through his knee. He knew he needed a new plan altogether, even if it meant undergoing yet another surgery, one no player in the NBA had ever attempted, let alone come back from.
"We tried so many different things. ... Finally we're like, look, this is all you got left," Dr. Brian J. Cole, Ball's orthopedic surgeon, told ESPN.
"This is a Hail Mary."
THE PLAY THAT set Ball on an unprecedented 1,009-day journey was wholly unremarkable. He was playing defense in the first half of a game against the Golden State Warriors on Jan. 12, 2022, and felt his knee jam as he came off a down screen.
Things like that happen all the time in the NBA. Most of the time the player shakes it off, ices it after the game and suits up again the next night. Ball didn't even come out of the game. It wasn't until he jammed the knee again, landing after making a layup with four minutes to go in the second quarter, that he began to suspect something might actually be wrong.
Ball's expression did not change at all after the play. No reporter after the game even bothered to ask whether he was hurt. The story of that game was Zach LaVine going down with a left knee injury and the Bulls, who were 27-12 and leading the Eastern Conference at the time, being humbled on their home court by the Warriors in a 138-96 defeat.
It was a reality check game for a Bulls team that had been a fun, first-half surprise that season after acquiring Ball, DeMar DeRozan and Alex Caruso in the offseason. The Warriors, of course, went on to win the championship that year.
"I don't think you [had] a full grasp of how smart he was and how much he meant to our team until he went down," LaVine told ESPN. "He was pretty much the glue. He made everything run offensively. Him and Alex defensively were taking a challenge on guys and making it easy for me and DeMar to go out there and do our jobs. He was getting us six to eight points without even really thinking."
Ball was ruled out of the game the following day because of left knee soreness, an injury everyone initially believed was minor. But after a week, coach Billy Donovan announced that Ball wasn't responding to the team's treatment plan and would need further testing. The next day, Ball was diagnosed with a bone bruise and small meniscus tear in his left knee that would require arthroscopic surgery. The scheduled recovery time was six to eight weeks, right in time for the playoffs.
Six weeks later, the Bulls released a video, showing Ball lifting weights and running at the team's practice facility. "Feeling pretty good," Ball said in the video. "Obviously, it's a slow process. I definitely want to get back on the court as soon as possible."
Soon after, pain began to radiate across his knee. He tried sprinting on the court, but his knee hurt. Then the Bulls training staff told him to try running on a track. It still hurt. Scaling back, they tried high marches and skips. The pain remained.
"It would work for a day, a week, but his knee just kept hurting," Brian Serrano, a Bulls athletic trainer, told ESPN. "And it kept getting worse."
In the meantime, the Bulls had fallen from surprise leaders of the Eastern Conference to clinging to the No. 6 seed. On April 6, they pulled the plug, ruling Ball out for the rest of the 2021-22 season.
"At first, I'm thinking four to six weeks, be back for the playoffs," Ball said. "We got a good team. I'll have a couple of weeks to get back, ready, and I'll be fine.
"When that didn't happen, we started trying all these shots, stuff like that, trying to kill my nerves. I was like, "This s--- just don't feel right. I'm doing a bunch of stuff and it's not ... translating into any good."
On April 28, the day after the Bulls were eliminated by the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round of the playoffs and more than three months since his injury, Ball sat for his exit interview. He had no answers.
He said his knee recovery was at a standstill.
THE BASKETBALL WORLD was introduced to Lonzo Ball during his freshman year at UCLA in 2016-17. He was a whiz at point guard, organizing the Bruins' offense like Magic Johnson used to do with the Showtime Era Los Angeles Lakers. And he was a winner, guiding UCLA to an upset of then-No. 1 Kentucky, in Lexington, and the team's best record since 2007-08.
His father, LaVar, was front and center for all of it, making sure the world knew just how good his son was and who had raised him. LaVar and his family became something of a cultural phenomenon. He told anyone who would listen that his two younger sons, LiAngelo and LaMelo, would become NBA players, too.
Their mother, Tina, was spotted at UCLA games early in the season but was rarely acknowledged beyond a quick camera shot in the stands.
Then, in February 2017, Tina disappeared from the stands and from public life -- a fact that went unnoticed for nearly a month as the Bruins were in the heart of Pac-12 play and preparing for the NCAA tournament.
Outwardly, the 18-year-old Lonzo gave nothing away, but his world had been shattered. His mom had suffered a serious stroke that required life-saving surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain.
"My cousin called me at 3 a.m. and was like, 'Your mom's about to die,'" Ball said recently. "I just went right home. I didn't tell nobody. I talked to my dad, and he was like, 'She's going to be OK.' He's like, 'I got her. Just go play.'"
March Madness was days away. The NBA draft was in June. All the fame and fortune LaVar had been preparing Lonzo for had finally arrived. The task was to compartmentalize. It was soul-crushing.
"I didn't get to see her until I got back home, in the summer," Ball said. "She was in the hospital the whole time.
"It was really hard. I went home for a day, then got sent right back out."
Ball talks to his mom every day now. She's better, although her right side and speech haven't fully recovered.
She's the reason, he said, that he has been able to persevere through the injuries and the uncertainty, why he has never given in to self-pity, no matter how painful or frustrating it became.
"I see the stuff that she goes through, and it's like, that's 10 times worse than what I have to deal with," he said. "It just puts things into perspective."
TALENT EVALUATORS USED to wonder whether Ball loved the game or was just trained by his father to play a certain way. What some read as calm decision-making, others read as a lack of passion.
It has been eight years since the world first got to know LaVar Ball and his three basketball-playing sons. Since the Big Baller Brand was born, selling $495 shoes -- some of which actually got delivered.
It was a sensational story, and LaVar was determined to milk every bit of it. He signed the family up to do a reality show for Facebook called, "Ball in the Family." He started his own youth basketball league, the Junior Basketball Association, after pulling his youngest son, LaMelo, out of high school. He built out the Big Baller Brand with a clothing line, bottled water and even hot sauce.
It was hard to tell where LaVar ended and Lonzo began. Which parts were LaVar's dreams, and which were his sons'?
Did they want to be NBA basketball players as much as he wanted them to? Did Lonzo actually want to wear Big Baller Brand shoes?
"I was an Adidas kid since high school, so I was thinking that was going to be the route," Ball said. "But what was told to me, I guess, wasn't what really happened. I was told that nobody wanted to partner with me, so my dad was like, 'Just rock the brand.' And I was like, 'All right.'"
The problem, Ball said, was that the first shoes his dad had made for him to wear at NBA summer league in 2017 were unwearable.
"They were like kickball shoes," Ball said. He wore them just twice that summer. He and his manager, Darren Moore, went out to Foot Locker stores in Las Vegas to buy a different pair of high-end shoes for each game. Ball played one game each in the Air Jordan XXXI, Nike Kobe A.D., Adidas Harden LS and Under Armour Curry 4 en route to winning summer league MVP.
Eventually, Big Baller Brand set up an arrangement with Skechers to manufacture its shoes, which Ball wore for his entire rookie season. But Ball said he wasn't happy with those shoes either and believes they could have contributed to the first meniscus injury he suffered as a rookie in January 2018.
"I think it's a possibility for sure, to be honest with you," Ball said. "I wasn't really getting hurt like that until I started wearing them."
Back in 2018, Ball chose the surgery with the quickest recovery time, hoping to return to help the Lakers make a playoff push in his first season. It seemed like the right choice for a 20-year-old with no history of knee issues. Ball missed 15 games and returned after the All-Star break, but by that point the Lakers were eight games back of eighth place in the West. After they were eliminated from the playoff race in late March, the Lakers shut Ball down for the season.
Looking back on all the problems he has had with that left knee over the past six years, Ball said he wonders whether there were already cartilage issues deep within his knee before he even reached the NBA -- thanks to years of playing on concrete and running sprints in Chino Hills State Park.
"My uncle used to always tell me, 'Y'all play too much outside,' because we were playing super hard in the backyard. That's on concrete," Ball said. "That was at least 15 years. So I mean, all that, over time, it can't be good for your knees."
He has had years to think about all of this -- the outdoor courts, the sprints, the shoes. Years and years to wonder why this all happened to him. To question. To doubt. And yet, in all that time, one emotion that hasn't seeped in is regret.
"I don't feel like I would be where I'm at if I didn't do all that stuff," Ball said. "All the work that we put in, it could have hurt, but it also made us who we are. "
There's no doubt in anyone's mind anymore whether this was his dream or his father's. Whether he loved the game or had simply been trained to play it.
"I've loved it my whole life," Ball said.
JOHN MEYER GETS desperate calls from athletes all the time. The famed rehabilitation specialist in Los Angeles has made a career out of helping athletes through daunting injuries and complex surgeries.
He first met Lonzo Ball in May 2022 when the Bulls asked him to give a fresh perspective on why this seemingly minor issue wasn't getting better.
Meyer put Ball through every cutting-edge test in his biomechanics lab in Los Angeles: artificial-intelligence-powered muscle analytics from a rapid MRI machine, three-dimensional cameras and force plates to create a strength profile of his whole body. The data indicated he needed to work on his hip and knee strength, so that's what they focused on during the offseason.
"As he rehabilitated and continued to push to return, he continued to wear down his knee," Meyer said. They kept running MRIs but couldn't find an answer to Ball's pain.
The Bulls had Serrano fly to Los Angeles throughout the offseason to help with Ball's recovery. They were banking on his return for the next season, having seen what their team could be with Ball as its engine.
"[Ball] was willing to try everything, do anything," Serrano said. "If we told him, we need you here at 8, he was here, 8. .... He was doing some sort of therapy, manual therapy, stretching, strength conditioning every day.
At the NBA draft in June, Bulls general manager Marc Eversley was asked whether Ball would be ready for training camp. Eversley said he certainly hoped so.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Ball could barely do a one-legged squat. He'd sit on a small stool, bend his left knee while keeping the right leg straight. The pain was excruciating and unrelenting.
It had been eight months since his initial surgery. Dr. Neal ElAttrache, a famed orthopedic surgeon specializing in athletes; Cole, who also serves as the Bulls' team physician; Meyer; and representatives from Ball's agency and the Bulls' front office met to outline a new recovery plan. Cole said Ball saw at least five knee specialists through the rest of 2022.
"There were opinions coming in from all over the country," Cole said.
With training camp approaching, they decided to perform a second knee surgery. Officially, it's called an "arthroscopic debridement," a cleanup of any broken tissue, bone or cartilage from a previous surgery. Unofficially, Ball called this a "search and rescue mission," the kind of operation the Coast Guard performs when someone is lost at sea.
A day before his second surgery in eight months, Ball spoke to reporters on a Zoom call from Los Angeles. "I still can't play basketball," he said. "I can't run or jump. There's a range from, like, 30 to 60 degrees when my knee is bent that I have no force. And I can't catch myself. I did rehab. It was getting better. But it was not to a point where I could get out there and actually go out there and run at full speed or jump. So surgery was the next step."
With Ball sidelined to start the season, the Bulls fell under .500 by the middle of November. Ball returned to Chicago about once a month for rehab, and his teammates would greet him excitedly.
"I would just text him, like, occasionally check in and see how he was doing," Bulls guard Coby White told ESPN. "If I saw a Bible verse, I would send it to him as motivation. ... Because when you are in that situation, you want to give him his space. Just check in here and there.
"We didn't want to be overwhelming. He's already got a lot of pressure on him and things going through his head. So we ain't going to add to that stress."
Five months later, in February 2023, Ball began to feel new pain in the inside of the joint, in the weight-bearing portion of his femur. Another MRI showed cartilage in the area beginning to separate from the bone. The Bulls ruled him out for the rest of the season. It was suggested he fly to Salt Lake City for an extensive nerve-blocking procedure to ease the pain.
"He was really struggling," Meyer said. "Just trying to understand, 'Why does it still hurt?'
"And at that point, we were kind of talking about [the rest of his] life, not really basketball."
Moore, who has known Ball since he was 7 years old, wondered more than once whether his friend had had enough. As delicately as he could, Moore would ask Ball what he'd do if he couldn't play basketball again.
Ball was still just 25. He had his daughter, Zoe, someone he wanted to play with, to run with. He had a girlfriend, Ally Rossel. Still, Ball wasn't ready to entertain the conversation.
"I just hated that no one could tell me," Ball said. "Like, if you're a professional, I feel like, 'You don't have any type of solution for me?'
"It just didn't feel right to me."
Getting stuck at the airport in the snowstorm was the final straw.
MEYER, COLE, ELATTRACHE, Serrano and Chip Schaefer, then the Bulls' director of performance health, convened a new series of calls to come up with a new plan.
This wasn't a pain issue or a meniscus issue anymore. It was also a cartilage deterioration issue, which injections to promote healing hadn't helped. Trying to fix old cartilage was just wasting more time.
His best shot to have a normal life, they thought, and maybe play basketball again, was to replace Ball's cartilage with cartilage from a cadaver, preferably someone around his age. There'd be a risk of tissue rejection, a risk that the graft wouldn't hold, and then the very real question of whether the cartilage graft could withstand the force and impact of an NBA game.
It'd be a procedure Cole had performed successfully a half-dozen times with NFL and NHL players, but no one had ever attempted it on a basketball player.
The recovery time would be an additional 18 months.
If anything went wrong, or even if everything went right but Ball could recapture only 80% of his previous athleticism, his professional basketball career could be over.
The doctors couldn't guarantee much of anything, except that this was probably the only option he had left.
"Basically doing this in a high-level athlete -- you got to manage expectations," Cole said.
"It wasn't just, 'Hey, do the two-hour surgery and you're done.' It's two years of rehabilitation and maintaining or getting his skills back. And torturing someone else's tissue in there until it became part of him.
And only Ball could make the decision.
Cole talked with Ball. "Tell me you can't play, and we can talk about this surgery," he told him. "But if you can play, I'd rather you play in some pain than go through this, which is unpredictable. God forbid it makes you worse. Nobody knows if it's going to work -- or how long it'll last. Please, play in pain."
Ball responded. "I can't do it."
They had their answer.
BALL WAS RELIEVED to have a plan and a potential resolution.
"I wish I didn't have to, but it was the only option left," Ball said. "I think a lot of people wrote me off because it was an unknown surgery.
"But at the end of the day, I was 25, so I was like, sit out this time, put the work in and hope for the best."
In March, Ball underwent the untested cartilage replacement surgery. Three months later, the Bulls announced that Ball would miss the entire 2023-24 season.
Rossel and Moore stayed with him and helped him through those first few months. The only activity he was allowed to do was use a continuous passive motion machine, which moved his knee for him. Everything else had to be done on crutches or in bed.
"When he had that machine and it was moving his leg," Moore said, "I could definitely tell his spirit was fighting. Like, 'I know I'm going to get back.' But, 'Man, this sucks.' But, 'I'm fighting.'
"And I told him, 'Look, man, we've been down before and we've still been able to create and do great things in s---ty moments.'"
Moore brought up the idea of starting a podcast as an outlet. For months they kicked around ideas, who should be on the podcast with him and whether this was the right move when it still wasn't clear he'd be able to resume his basketball career. But eventually Ball realized he actually had a lot to say.
The irony of launching his podcast talking about everything in his life just when he finally got rid of all the cameras and attention that used to follow him everywhere is not lost on Ball. It's appropriately titled, "What an Experience."
"This is different, though," Ball said. "Because I control it. I'm pushing my own narrative as opposed to somebody telling me what to say, or shooting the scene. 'Put this in play, and do it like that.' The cameras that we have now, if I don't want it to go, I just cut them off."
THE ONLY CAMERAS around those first few months after the cartilage replacement surgery were Moore's iPhone and the high-tech cameras in Meyer's biometrics lab.
Every morning, Ball would drive from his house in Sherman Oaks to Meyer's facility in El Segundo for an 11 a.m. appointment. They'd work for hours -- on movement patterns, walking, loading, strengthening. Measuring everything as they went to determine when his body was ready for more.
Little by little, they started to see improvements.
He'd be able to walk without feeling pain the next day. Eventually they tried the one-legged step down from the stool that had given him so many problems in the past. No pain.
"We weren't even cautiously optimistic at that point," Serrano said. "We were just happy he was able to do [day-to-day] activities."
On Aug. 22, ESPN's Stephen A. Smith mentioned on "First Take" that he had heard Ball was having trouble getting up from a sitting position and no one was sure he'd ever play again. The statement would've been true a few months earlier. But Ball had made progress by then and was irked enough to respond with a video of himself doing the one-legged squat.
"I'll never forget the Stephen A. moment," Moore said. "We were actually in the gym when that happened, and he was on his way to getting back onto the floor. ... It lit a fire underneath us."
Throughout the fall, small signs of progress begat unbridled optimism. Ball could still walk without pain. He began completing small exercises without pain. Small jumps, on two legs, then one. Sore, but no pain.
Jumping off one leg was a milestone for Ball -- and his doctors.
"That was more than we'd ever done through the conservative care, the other operations, the shots, all that," Serrano said. "This was further than he'd ever been."
Running was next.
"I actually held him from running for a long time," Meyer said. "Because running was where he failed every time coming out of the other surgeries. So I felt like he had a lot of demons when it comes to running. I knew mentally if he failed, it was going to be a big disappointment."
He passed. On Dec. 28, 2023, more than nine months after the cartilage replacement surgery, and nearly two years since the injury, Donovan announced that Ball had been cleared to run.
LaVine soon joined Ball in L.A. after undergoing foot surgery in February.
"He was the same guy, very optimistic and happy, but then you also started to see his competitiveness come back," LaVine said. "He would start asking like, 'Let's go out and shoot, you know, let's do some shooting games.' I would see him in the gym shooting, he'll mess around, throw the ball on me and try to guard me and stuff like that. As he started to feel better, you could see his mood just as a basketball player come back and be like, oh, OK. He's starting to have some of that itch."
They continued working out together. LaVine has witnessed the entirety of Ball's journey -- the early highs, the long, deep lows. He was there when Ball set foot back in Chicago for his first practice in years, too.
"He gets the ball, flies up the floor like he was never hurt, sets a back screen for a guy, gets it back, splits a pick-and-roll and then does a no-look pass toJalen Smith," LaVine said. "I remember I was just sitting there, I was like, holy s---."
ON OCT. 11, 2024, the day Ball had been working toward finally arrived: He announced on his podcast that he was cleared by the team's doctors to play. His first game action in 1,009 days would come on Oct. 16, in the Bulls' fourth preseason game against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Inside the United Center, Ball warmed up with Serrano at half court. He was on a strict minutes restriction, four four-minute stints, one in each quarter.
Midway through the first quarter, Donovan called Ball's number from the bench. As Ball walked to the scorer's table, the home crowd exploded with a standing ovation.
Ball threw his hands to the air and tapped his heart as he inbounded the ball. A few possessions later, Ball rewarded them, knocking down a 3-pointer from the corner. As he ran back up the court and threw three fingers up in the air, Bulls fans, who had watched their team wallow in mediocrity for much of the past three seasons, shook with glee. LaVine ran up the baseline on the opposite end. He fought back tears.
"I can only imagine how he felt," Bulls forward Patrick Williams told ESPN. "My heart was pounding for him."
Cole, the surgeon who performed the "Hail Mary" on Ball's knee 19 months earlier, was seated near the Bulls bench. "It was like someone who gets a lung transplant [was] able to go for a run," he said. "I've been doing this for 26 years. Probably one of the most special nights I've had."
Ball finished with 10 points on 4-of-6 shooting in 15 minutes. This season, he's averaging 4.5 points and 3.5 assists in just over 16 minutes per game. He missed 15 games because of a sprain in his right wrist before returning Nov. 27.
After the preseason game against the Timberwolves ended, LaVine made a beeline to grab the game ball from the officiating crew to bring back to the Bulls' locker room. LaVine and Coby White are two of only five players still on the team from the last time Ball was on the court.
"Today was going to be a special day regardless of the outcome," White said in the locker room. "'Zo back, man." He tossed the basketball to Ball, who tapped his heart with his right hand and smiled. "This was a hell of a night for him."
"One more thing," LaVine said. Sitting at his locker, he held up a jersey with signatures from all of Ball's current teammates. "I respect you more than anything because of what you've been through. We love you, we care about you. Glad to see you back."
After LaVine and Ball embraced, Ball was mobbed by his teammates, White slapping his head as Ball led the huddle. "Family," he said, "on three. 1-2-3. Family."br/]
