There will always be a temptation to look at Lonzo Ball's career and wonder what might have been.
But that shouldn't be the only way it is remembered.
Ball entered the NBA as one of the most scrutinised prospects of his generation. Drafted second overall by the Lakers in 2017, the noise surrounding him was enormous before he had even played an NBA game.
Yet underneath all of it was a genuinely unusual basketball player.
Ball never became the high-volume scorer normally associated with a top-two pick. Instead, his value came from almost everywhere else.
He could see passes before they developed, push the ball ahead without needing to dominate possession and defend multiple positions. After struggling badly as a shooter early in his career, he rebuilt that part of his game too.
By the time he reached Chicago, everything appeared to be coming together.
The Bulls version of Lonzo Ball may ultimately be the biggest glimpse of the player he could have become.
He was defending, creating, rebounding and shooting efficiently while giving Chicago an entirely different tempo in transition. Then, in January 2022, he injured his left knee.
What followed was far bigger than an ordinary basketball injury.
Multiple procedures failed to solve the problem. Ball eventually underwent cartilage and meniscus transplant procedures and went more than 1,000 days without appearing in an NBA game.
At various points, simply returning to professional basketball seemed unlikely.
And then he did it.
When Ball stepped onto an NBA court again in October 2024, the statistics almost didn't matter. Getting there was the achievement.
His body never allowed him to fully recover the player he had been before the injury, and his 2025-26 season in Cleveland ultimately became his last NBA stop before he was traded to Utah and waived.
If this is indeed the end, Ball leaves the NBA at only 28.
That feels extraordinarily young.
But reducing his career to disappointment would miss something important.
Ball played NBA basketball again after an injury ordeal that could easily have ended his career years earlier. He changed his shooting mechanics, transformed one of his biggest weaknesses and became an excellent complementary guard rather than stubbornly trying to become the superstar people once expected.
The tragedy of Lonzo Ball's career isn't that he failed to become what people predicted when he was drafted.
It's that just as he appeared to have discovered exactly what kind of NBA player he could be, his body stopped giving him the opportunity to show us.
LEAN EDGE VERDICT
Lonzo Ball will inevitably become one of basketball's great "what if?" conversations.
What if the knee had held up? What if that Chicago team had stayed healthy? What would Ball have looked like through the prime years he should only now be entering?
We'll never get those answers.
But his comeback deserves to sit alongside those questions.
Ball didn't get the career that once appeared to be waiting for him. He did something arguably harder: after more than 1,000 days away and a medical journey few NBA players have ever experienced, he made it back.
If this really is the end at 28, Lonzo Ball's career was far too short.
It certainly wasn't meaningless.
