LaVar Ball turned down an offer to take Big Baller Brand public, and he explained exactly why during an appearance on the Gil’s Arena podcast this weekend. Going public would have meant investors. Investors would have meant a board. A board would have meant somebody other than him deciding what the company does. He was not interested in any part of that chain, and he said so plainly.
That is the whole argument, and it is worth separating from the noise around it, because LaVar Ball has spent nine years being covered as a personality when the thing he actually keeps talking about is ownership structure. He does not want a licensing deal. He does not want a strategic partner. He wants the cap table to have exactly one name on it and then to hand that cap table to his children. Everything else he does, including the parts that get him mocked, follows from that position.
The pricing conversation is where it gets sharp. He walked through the math openly, describing shirts that cost a few dollars to produce and sell for sixty, and he did not flinch at how that sounds. His position is that the margin is the entire point. A brand that sets its own prices and keeps the full spread does not need outside capital, and a brand that does not need outside capital never has to give up equity to get it. That is not a defense of the price tag so much as an explanation of what the price tag is funding, which is his independence.
Then he pulled the comparison he has been building toward for years, which is Michael Jordan. Jordan Brand generates billions annually and is one of the most valuable properties in sports. It is also owned by Nike. Jordan is the most successful athlete endorser in history and he is, structurally, still an endorser. LaVar Ball’s counter is that whatever Big Baller Brand is worth, it goes to Lonzo, LiAngelo, and LaMelo without a corporate parent in between. Smaller number, complete ownership. You can argue the number matters more than the ownership, and plenty of people will, but the distinction he is drawing is real and it is not a stupid one.
He also went back to the Junior Basketball Association and the Facebook money, a grievance he has been carrying since 2018. The JBA ran a single season with eight teams, promised players monthly salaries starting around three thousand dollars plus a cut of jersey sales, and streamed its games online. It did not survive the year. LaVar Ball’s version has always been that the platform money did not come through the way it was supposed to. What is documented on the other side is that former players including Brandon Phillips said publicly they were paid a fraction of what they were promised, that some of them gave up NCAA eligibility to be there, and that the league stopped returning calls. Those are two different stories about the same collapse, and the second one has more names attached to it.
The skepticism is earned, and none of it is hard to find. Nike, Under Armour, and Adidas all passed when he insisted they license Big Baller Brand from him rather than sign his son directly. He responded by telling Colin Cowherd in 2017 that the price for a shoe deal had gone up to three billion, “billion, billion, billion.” The ZO2 launched at four hundred ninety five dollars. The Better Business Bureau gave the company an F after being flooded with complaints from customers who never got their orders or got the wrong ones. In 2019 the whole thing effectively went dark following a split with co founder Alan Foster, who alleged in legal filings that LaVar had taken more than two point six million dollars from the company, a claim the family denied. Photos surfaced that summer of Big Baller Brand merchandise on folding tables at ninety percent off. Lonzo covered his BBB tattoo and said the shoes were not good.
So when LaVar Ball says he turned down going public, the fair question is whether anybody was actually offering, and that is a question we cannot answer from the outside. What we can say is that the brand did not disappear. It restructured, kept the name, moved into automotive products with a wheel line in 2024, and is still his. He had a partial leg amputation in early 2025 and was back in public within months. LiAngelo signed a reported thirteen million dollar recording deal off “Tweaker.” LaMelo is a max contract player. Lonzo is still in the league. The three sons the brand was built around are all adults with their own money now, which means the inheritance argument is less theoretical than it was when he first started making it.
That is what LaVar Ball was really saying on Gil’s Arena. Not that Big Baller Brand beat Nike, because it did not. That the version of winning he chose was never the one that ends in a check from somebody else. He would rather own a smaller thing entirely than be the face of a bigger thing he does not control, and he is willing to look ridiculous while he waits to find out whether that was smart. Nine years in, the company still exists and it still belongs to him. Whether that is a legacy or a very long stretch of stubbornness is the argument, and he seems fine either way.
