D’Angelo Russell gets in on the joke, warns Ben Simmons in new ad
Former LSU forward Ben Simmons is widely expected to come off the board with either the first or second selection in Thursday’s 2016 NBA draft. After he does, he’ll face the same sort of jarring transition from prep star and college prospect to life as a full-fledged professional that many of his predecessors have tried to manage. One of them, Los Angeles Lakers guard and 2015 No. 2 pick D’Angelo Russell, offers him a bit of advice in a new pre-draft Foot Locker commercial:
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Um … zing!
We’re just three months removed from the the public revelation of a video Russell had surreptitiously recorded in which Lakers teammate Nick Young discusses relationships with women outside of his engagement to musician Iggy Azalea — an engagement that, by the way, is now off due to “trust issues” — and from the firestorm that ensued. Russell’s apology for a prank gone awry did little to quell all manner of post-leak takes focusing on the 20-year-old’s breach of unwritten intra-squad rules and the long road Russell faced, and continues to face, as he attempts to regain his teammates’ trust and rehabilitate his reputation. Sure, three months feels like an eon in internet time, but this is still kind of amazing — not that it’s a joke in and of itself, because this exact joke has already been made, but that Russell himself is co-signing it.
But it is a joke, and a pretty freaking funny one, and as our Eric Freeman wrote two years back, this is the goal of pretty much every Foot Locker spot featuring NBA players: not “to argue for the product as much as to align the brand with a certain sort of knowing humor.” Digging this doesn’t require you to care one way or the other about the “nice gear” Karl-Anthony Towns is wearing; you just need to know about a catastrophic error in judgment, the tabloid-gossip-column whirlwind it kicked up, that tragedy plus even a little bit of time equals comedy, and that the best way to move past being the butt of the joke is to get in on it.
Kind of a lot going on in 30 seconds, huh?
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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