Los Angeles Lakers guard Lonzo Ball is slowly becoming more independent and his decision to sever ties from his business partner Alan Foster was a big step in that process.
According to Ramona Shelburne of ESPN, Lonzo made the decision to let go of and sue Foster without the immediate support of his father LaVar Ball, who reportedly was still associated with Foster “up until the last couple of days”:
“The biggest development was Lonzo Ball made the decision to to sever ties with Alan Foster independent of his dad. And I know this as a reporter having worked on it, we had a story we’d been working on for a couple of months and it was really only in the last couple of days that LaVar Ball came to the same place that Lonzo Ball had gotten to, trying to understand what happened with Alan Foster and severing ties with him. Up until the last couple of days, LaVar was still associated with Alan Foster.”
This backs up everything that Shelbrune reported in March. According to the initial report, Lonzo had raised concerns about Foster to LaVar, but trusted that his father would handle the situation. When LaVar took too long to take action, Lonzo took matters into his own hands with the help of his financial advistor Humble Lukanga of Life Line Financial Group, his manager Darren Moore and his now former agent, Harrison Gaines.
LaVar hopped on board eventually, but it sounds Lonzo already had his mind made up by the time he did. This isn’t the first time LaVar has seemingly been out of the loop when it comes to Lonzo’s business decision, either.
Earlier this week, Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports reported that LaVar was still the “shot-caller” in Lonzo’s business decisions. Just a few hours later, Lonzo denied that report via Tania Ganguli of the Los Angeles Times.
While LaVar has came out and said that things are still the same between the family since then, it’s not that hard to read between the lines. For better or worse, Lonzo is the conductor of his own orchestra.
