The Charlotte Hornets selected LaMelo Ball with their third overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft and in the short time since he's already impressed both general manager Mitch Kupchak and head coach James Borrego.
"This is a guy that wants to be great, he doesn’t just talk about it he lives it. He’s got an infectious spirit, his energy, his desire to be great, his desire to make the most out of players around him- that excites me. So for me it’s a joy to have someone in the program that I’m not going to have to wear this guy out to get him in the gym, he’s just in the gym, he wants to be in the gym," head coach James Borrego said.
Ball's love of the game even led him to ask Kupchak and Borrego for a place to shoot around after a dinner with the other draft picks wrapped late during his first week in Charlotte.
"I do know he loves the games, we had him in Charlotte the day after the draft and we had a dinner where everybody was distanced at a local restaurant in a big room. It was about 9:30/10 o’clock at night and he leaned over and he said to me is there a place I can go shoot after dinner. I’m looking at my watch and I’m saying, I go to bed in 30 minutes and he wanted to go shoot. So, we did find a place for him to go shoot at our facility. He stayed there until 12:30 at night. I do know he loves the game, and he plays for the right reasons," Hornets GM Mitch Kupchak said. "I also know that he’s not the typical rookie, who went from high school, the AAU program, to a top-level college where he was maybe overly pampered and then came out when he as a freshman. He did spend on his own, a year in Lithuania and then he also spent a year on his own in Australia."
I’ll take you to that night, this is where it started. We’re having a dinner and we’re getting to know each other it’s about conversation and building a relationship. We are a culture that is about dinners. If you were to sum up our culture it’s like sitting at a dinner table, we’re about relationships, connections and we’re having a meal together, we’re having some good food and the kid decides he wants to get in the gym. He says, “Can you find us a gym?”, and obviously we figured that out and got him in the gym and he worked for a couple hours. He didn’t have to do that, he could’ve went back to his room and celebrated and looked at all of his feeds and all of his followers and good stuff that I guess these kids do nowadays. But he wanted to be in the gym and to me if he continues with that mindset and spirit the sky is the limit for him and not just him but for all our players,” Borrego said.