Josh Calverley

LaMelo Ball showed up at the Minnesota Timberwolves facility for the first time this summer, and somebody from the public relations staff was standing there, and instead of walking past he stopped and asked what their name was and told them it was nice to meet them. He came back the next day and knew the name of every single person in that building. Tim Connelly runs the Timberwolves front office, and he told that story on a podcast back in August, and he made a point of saying that remembering all those names is not a given at this level, because the season runs 82 games and there are late arrivals and long flights and shootarounds in half empty buildings, and most people living that life have days where it shows. Then Connelly said the line that got picked up everywhere. "The consistent opinion was that the guy has no bad days." Jon Krawczynski covers the team for The Athletic, and he sat down with Ball for about ten minutes this fall, and he came out saying the same thing everyone else in the building says. "One thing that everyone says is he knows everyone's name in the building," Krawczynski said, and then he went further. "I'm talking, everyone, from the janitor to the workout guy to the head of basketball operations." Then this. "It doesn't matter if you make millions of dollars in that building or if you're making minimum wage." Ball spent his first six seasons in Charlotte and arrived in Minnesota over the offseason in a trade that sent him and Josh Green north for Naz Reid and a package of draft picks, and he showed up with a reputation that was built almost entirely out of three word answers at a podium, and people watched those answers and decided he was not interested in engaging with anybody. Krawczynski said that read has been wrong the whole time, and that ten minutes in a room with him is enough to see it, and that Ball is not a flake at all. "There's a care factor about him that I think is hidden by the optics of just who he is, or how he presents himself," Krawczynski said. "There's real substance to him. There's soul to him." Then on Monday night in Minneapolis he went out and gave the city the basketball version of it, scoring 34 points against the Milwaukee Bucks for his highest total of the season, making 12 of his 21 shots and six of his thirteen three pointers and adding six rebounds, and Minnesota won the game 112-100 with Ball finishing plus 17 on a night his true shooting percentage was 73.3. Connelly had said back in August that the fit was about more than the shooting, and that the positivity had been completely consistent with what the organization wants to be, and that the joy Ball plays with was going to sit well next to Anthony Edwards, who responds to joy and fun more than he responds to anything else. Krawczynski summed up those ten minutes one more way. "This is a person that wants to connect, and he has been anything but flaky, anything but aloof."