Give Lonzo Ball the Anonymity He Badly Needs, But Will Never Get

All eyes . . . okay, most eyes . . . all right, all right, some eyes will be on the new point guard of the Los Angeles Lakers this evening when he and his teammates face the Golden State Warriors in L.A. this evening.
 
And that's already a bad thing.
 
What Lonzo Ball needs right now is a nice stretch of anonymity. The folks who have nailgunned the sins of his father to his hide, the people who savage his shot as a defiance of the laws of physics, the people who compare him mercilessly to Philadelphia's far more dynamic Ben Simmons, and his own sense of his place in the NBA – all of it demands that he be able to drift a bit until he can find the player he is meant to be.
 
That, he will not get.
 
We will not mention his name again here only to minimize the amount of knee-jerkery attached to him by the rivers of hype that he signed on for from his time in high school, but he is the one who gambled on his talent and so far has been a mild disappointment. He did not take the league by storm, and is not even the most productive rookie on his own struggling team. He shows flashes of the skill and vision credited to him, but he seems to be working inside his own head too often and being less instinctive and more oppressed by the expectations of HypeWorld.
 
But his is the biggest stack of chips on the table, and his is the attention that brings. And since we are not a patient people, we will laser-lock on him as he goes through the herculean task of figuring it all out on the fly. He is not only learning the lessons all rookies have to learn, but some that were imposed upon him by the outside world, and yes, that includes the old man.
 
So if you must watch Warriors-Lakers (and you must), see how often you can avoid seeking him out, and instead see if he can make his game come to you. See if you can make this less about the eldest non-self-absorbed Ball as a singular entity and more about a player easing his way into a massive tank with 419 sharks.
 
He won't know you've done that on his behalf, but he'll thank you in a plane of existence where karma works like money.
 
Or Maui. Take your pick.