You could be forgiven if you haven’t watched much Lonzo Ball lately. He did just miss two full seasons, after all, and even upon his return, the Bulls aren’t exactly at the top of anyone’s League Pass rankings. Once among the most ballyhooed prospects of the century, Ball has amazingly managed to fly under the radar playing in the NBA’s third-biggest market. Because despite the injury history, the losing and his relatively limited playing time, Ball has quietly emerged as one of the most interesting veterans available at the 2025 trade deadline.
According to K.C. Johnson of CHSN, there is “optimism” that the Bulls will be able to find a Ball deal ahead of the deadline that nets them draft capital. Just how much draft capital, though, is a matter of debate. According to Marc Stein, the Bulls have heard offers, but aren’t especially eager to make a deal and would be open to re-signing him after the season. That could be the truth. It could be posturing for leverage. Logically, it would make sense for the Bulls to trade any veteran not nailed down after giving up Zach LaVine. It’s time to tank, and given Ball’s health history, it’s hard to imagine him costing too much. The benefit of trading for someone who just missed two years is that they should be relatively cheap.
That’s not quite true from a salary perspective. Ball has a cap figure just south of $21.4 million this season. That’s probably a bit too rich for the apron teams, but it’s manageable enough to their less expensive competitors, especially those that have superfluous salary on their books already. Ball is an expiring contract, so the only risk in landing him is the surrendered draft capital. If the cost here is a couple of second-round picks, the risk is minimal.
The reward, however, has a chance to be significant. Ball isn’t the star his father told us he was going to be, but even in light of all of his injuries, he’s having a very, very good season.
Pick an all-in-one defensive metric that’s built on per-minute value rather than volume. Whether it’s D-LEBRON, D-EPM, D-BPM or any others, they’re all going to tell you the same thing: Ball has been the best defender on the Bulls this season. That’s been reflected in the box score as well. He leads the Bulls in both steals and deflections per game. He’s very switchable at 6-foot-6 with a 6-foot-9 wingspan, but he remains a strong on-ball defender against even the best guards in the NBA.
Shooting has been a bit more of a mixed bag this season. He is making just 34.8% of his 3-pointers — his worst percentage since leaving the Lakers. You’re betting on track record to an extent. With both the Pelicans and Bulls, shooting was a strength. Working in his favor? The shots he’s missing are the easy ones. He’s making only 30.2% of his wide-open triples this season, but he’s at 43.4% on open looks. In his last healthy season, he drilled over 49% of his wide-open 3’s. He’s going to move closer to the mean over time, and almost any team that could land him is going to have better shot-creation than the Bulls do.
Ball himself will contribute to it, though not in traditional ways. He has all but abandoned anything inside of the arc. He’s taken 187 shots this season and only 32 of them have been 2-pointers. Only half of those shots have come in the restricted area. He takes less than one free-throw per game. In most cases, it’s nearly impossible for a player to simultaneously provide meaningful play-making value and absolutely no rim pressure.
But Ball does it on vision and know-how alone. Get him in the open-court and he’s going to either find the right pass or create a better one out of thin air. Those transition opportunities are rare in the playoffs, but it pairs well with his defense. He generates turnovers and uses those turnovers to generate good shots for teammates. Surround him with the right athletes and more of those opportunities will present themselves. He’s not creating advantages off of the bounce in the half-court, but he has a long history of coaxing otherwise stationary teammates into cutting more. LaVine scored 64 points off of cuts during his partial season with Ball during the 2021-22 campaign. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s more than he scored in the two, Ball-free seasons that followed combined.
High-level defense across multiple positions. Turnover-generation, and subsequent transition excellence. Shooting that is decent at worst and quite good at best. These are traits that, when combined, usually cost multiple first-round picks or a hefty free agent contract to acquire. They’re potentially gettable for a more reasonable price now because of Ball’s health.
Will his body hold up? That’s obviously impossible to say, but he’s trending in the right direction now. Billy Donovan recently revealed that his minutes limit has been pushed up to 28. He’s missed just five games since the start of December, and three of them have come in back-to-backs. That sort of caution is probably a necessity. No team should acquire Ball planning to start him. He’s probably a 20-minute or so player at this point, but a very, very good one.
There’s plenty of precedent for such a player impacting winning at the highest levels. The easy comparison here would be Shaun Livingston. Like Ball, he was a bigger point guard drafted high in the lottery by a Los Angeles team hoping to turn him into a star. Like Ball, his career was nearly derailed by injuries. After bouncing around for a few years, he eventually landed in Golden State and the rest was history. He never played 20 minutes per game as a Warrior, but he won three championships as a key reserve for Steve Kerr.
The same basic principle applies to Ball. He just needs to land with the right team. So who are some candidates? An easy one would be Memphis. Ball wouldn’t even need a minutes restriction there. The Grizzlies are organizationally committed to using its bench and limiting minutes for its key players. Desmond Bane leads the team at 30.1 minutes per game. There’s sensible matching salary between Luke Kennard and John Konchar, and while the Grizzlies have traded most of their own second-rounders, they do have enough second-round picks coming in from other teams to feasibly entice Chicago.
The Rockets run a much shorter rotation, but the opportunity cost for them would be minimal. They could match salary with Jock Landale and Jeff Green, who aren’t likely to see playoff minutes anyway, and simply slot Ball into the backup guard minutes that have gone to Aaron Holiday and Reed Sheppard this season. Obviously, in the long run, the Rockets will need to find minutes to develop Sheppard. But he’s fallen out of the rotation this season, and if the Rockets want a win-now addition that slides easily into their defensive culture, Ball fits the bill.
Wanna get really frisky? How about the Milwaukee Bucks. They are currently reportedly discussing a trade with the Washington Wizards that would swap Khris Middleton for Kyle Kuzma, and in doing so, they’d duck below the second apron. That would free them up to aggregate salary. It’s hard to imagine the Bulls taking on the 2025-26 salaries of Bobby Portis and Pat Connaughton, but if the Bucks could muster the draft capital to convince them, he’d be a perfect fit for them. He’s not Jrue Holiday, but he’s the 3-and-D guard they’re missing right now. He and Kuzma obviously know each other from their time in Los Angeles, and Ball throwing outlet passes to him and Giannis Antetokounmpo would be very, very dangerous.
These are just a few possible suitors. There are plenty more. No matter how risky an addition Ball is from a health perspective, he is simply too good to continue languishing on a sub-.500 team that is either about to kickstart a tank or, more distressingly, continue aimlessly competing for No. 10 seeds. If you’re looking to reboot your entire team with a player like Luka Doncic or De’Aaron Fox, Ball isn’t for you. But for the rest of the league, the teams looking for purely additive role players that can seamlessly slide onto winning rosters and do the little things necessary to compete for championships? Ball is exactly the sort of player they should be targeting.
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