I was dead wrong about LaMelo Ball. But that doesn’t mean he’s doing everything right

Let me start by falling on my own sword and we’ll get to the “but” later. Here goes:

I was completely wrong about whether the Charlotte Hornets should draft LaMelo Ball with the No. 3 overall pick in the 2020 NBA draft.

Picking Ball was the correct thing to do, and the Hornets have themselves a potential future star in this 19-year-old human highlight film.

Consider this my mea culpa. Every time Melo has another splashy game, lots of people gleefully send me links to my own draft-night column when the Hornets drafted Ball. The online headline: “Hornets dropped the ball by drafting LaMelo. He won’t be the star Charlotte needs.”

Then they’ll ask me something like: “Do you remember this?”

Yes, I remember it. I wrote it. As promised in that column, if Ball was way better than I expected and general manager Mitch Kupchak had made the right decision, I would virtually eat those words. The sound you now hear is me chewing on the corner of my own laptop.

But…

OK wait, not yet. Let me grovel a bit more first.

I totally miscalculated that night three months ago how good Ball would be, and how quickly he would adjust to the NBA. He’s now started the past eight games and the Hornets will never get him out of the starting lineup again. He deserves to start.

Ball ranks among the top three Charlotte players already — Gordon Hayward and Terry Rozier are the other two — and he will be their very best player one day.

Ball has the ability to make multiple NBA All-Star teams. He has “I can get your team deep in the playoffs if you put good people around me” potential. If you couldn’t trade up with Golden State for James Wiseman in November — heck, maybe even if you could — the Hornets (13-15) got just what they needed. More talent. The Carolina Panthers are dreaming right now of grabbing a quarterback with Ball’s potential and his ability to pass.

But….

LaMelo Ball as an NBA player still has some issues.

LaMelo Ball’s issues

Those issues were exposed again Sunday night when Charlotte lost a 16-point lead at the end of the first quarter and got beaten by 12 by the San Antonio Spurs.

Ball had some great moments, like he always does. And the fact that I’m nitpicking a game where Melo scored 17 points, grabbed 12 rebounds and had 8 assists shows just how far Ball has come already, because those are really good numbers. He’s a lock to end up as the NBA’s Rookie of the Year as long as he stays healthy.

And that 2-on-1 fast break Sunday in which he stole the ball, threw a behind-the-back pass to Malik Monk and then got a snazzy return pass from Monk for a layup? If we weren’t in a pandemic and a crowd had actually been allowed in the Spectrum Center, that would have blown a hole in the roof.

But there were some Ball blunders, too, particularly in the second half. Ball shot 1 for 8 and had only 3 points after halftime (he was 7-for-20 shooting for the game, never getting a “shooter’s roll” in part because of his unorthodox jump shot). He had 5 turnovers for the game.

And his defensive mistakes too often led directly to points by the other team. That’s part of the reason he was minus-16 in the plus-minus category while playing 39 minutes, the second-most of his brief NBA career, due to the Hornets being short-handed due to COVID-19.

I asked Hornets coach James Borrego about Ball after the San Antonio game.

“I thought he was productive tonight,” Borrego said. “He got to the rim. Made plays. I’ve got to watch the defense again — you know, that’s the work in progress. There’s got to be accountability there. There’s got to be a pride about that.”

Make no mistake — Borrego is on #TeamMelo. As he said later in the same press conference: “I love coaching him. He’s developing right before our eyes. … He’s having a major impact on our program, our team, our city and our culture … We found ourselves a heck of a player and a heck of a person. There’s room for growth here, which is exciting.”

How to make LaMelo better

Yes, there’s room for growth. As good as Ball’s numbers are — he’s averaging 14.6 points, 6.2 rebounds and 6.1 assists per game close to halfway through his rookie season while shooting 35.4% from 3-point range and 43.7% overall — they aren’t yet extraordinary.

Nic Batum, for instance, had nearly identical averages for the Hornets in his first two seasons in Charlotte, and he was also a better defender then than Ball is now.

Did people go wild night after night about Batum? He got a $120-million contract from the Hornets that the team would later come to regret. So I guess they did in some respects.

But Batum didn’t have Melo’s innate flair for the game, nor his famous family backstory. And he wasn’t 19 and the next new thing. Batum wasn’t always on SportsCenter, and people weren’t always proclaiming that he was God’s gift to basketball.

Let me stop there before I go too far down that track. Again, I’m publicly switching to #TeamMelo now. I was wrong on draft night. I’m glad the Hornets drafted him. Not only does he provide entertainment for what had been a boring team, but he’s got stunning potential. He’s still a teenager. The defense can be learned. The turnovers can be curbed.

The key to making Ball better, though, is not to play him 40 minutes a game and just say, “You do you, Melo!” That may be what his loud dad Lavar Ball and a lot of fans would want, but that’s not realistic. You don’t need to wear rose-colored glasses with Ball. The view is awfully good without them.

And the way to view Ball now is this: He isn’t yet a great NBA player, night in and night out.

But Ball was absolutely a great draft choice because one day he can be great. There’s a first-team All-NBA player in that No. 2 uniform somewhere. If Borrego and his staff find it, they will stick around Charlotte a long time, and Ball will, too. Which is a good thing, because LaMelo Ball is the future of the Charlotte Hornets.

And, finally, the future looks bright.