Report: Balls' Lithuanian recruitment began with unsolicited tweet

Lithuania is well known as one of Europe's basketball hotbeds, and a report is shedding light on just how significant the move of LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball to domestic squad Prienai-Birstonas Vytautas is being received there.

Included in the piece by The New York Times' Andrew Keh is that the initial contact between the team and the Ball camp began with a random tweet from a part-time Prienai employee:

At around 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 6, Erikas Kirvelaitis, a 21-year-old basketball journalist in Lithuania, sent an unsolicited question via Twitter to Harrison Gaines, a sports agent in Los Angeles with two semifamous teenage clients: Would LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball, by any chance, be interested in playing professional basketball in Prienai?

Kirvelaitis had been hired only a few months earlier to do part-time communications work for Prienai-Birstonas Vytautas, a small club here in the Lithuanian basketball league. His bosses did not know at first about his Twitter gambit. It was a shot the dark, anyway.

But to Kirvelaitis’s amazement, Gaines wrote back asking for more information. And less than a week later, the young Americans were signing contracts to begin their professional careers in this unassuming town nearly 6,000 miles from home.

"It was like a dream, crazy, a miracle, for our club to even have contact with them," Kirvelaitis told Keh. "But I’m someone who believes anything can be done if you try."

The Balls are expected in Lithuania in early January. Their father, LaVar meanwhile, has announced plans for an alternative development league to the NCAA.