Why OJ Mayo Is Banned From The NBA

OJ Mayo got banned from the NBA after challenging Michael Jordan, but why #NBA

He was being called the next LeBron in high school, averaged over 18 points in his rookie year, and seven years later, got the longest ban in NBA history. OJ Mayo was on track to be a star, he challenged Michael Jordan, so what happened?

OJ Mayo was basketball’s next big thing…

OJ Mayo was doing things folks rarely witnessed before… and by the time his junior season came around, he was already the third-ranked high school player in the entire country at just 15 years old.

And that was Piece #1 OJ Mayo was supposed to be an NBA star.

This was it: an NBA scout even said of a sophomore Mayo that “It’s hard to say a guard is a can’t-miss prospect, but he’s as close to that as you can get” …

Everything was looking up for Mayo… even getting an exclusive invitation to the famous “Flight School” basketball camp… a camp only open to college freshmen, but Mayo was already talented enough as an 11th grader to get an invite…

OJ was the youngest one there but was trash-talking everyone. It was Michael Jordan’s camp and according to OJ. But… what did exactly happen?

OJ Mayo made it his mission to score on MJ… he didn’t back down, he got a few buckets, and the campers all began sounding off, cheering on Mayo and as the more he scored, the more trash he spit at Mike…

But before we get there, there was no way MJ was going to lay back and let Mayo continue running his mouth… so what did Mike do? MJ was hell-bent to shut Mayo up in classic MJ fashion, hitting fadeaway after fadeaway, jarring, hand-checking, getting physical on defensive… all while saying “You better scream for Mama.”

And even causing him some trouble along the trail. Because when OJ Mayo would enter college in just the following year, he’d get involved in a recruiting scandal and violated NCAA rules in his one and only year at the school.

But with how big OJ Mayo had become, no one was willing to talk or hear about anything other than how generationally-gifted he really was, even in his one-and-done year at USC, and he was one of the best freshmen ever.

Derrick Rose went first in the draft, Mayo went third and well OJ’s rookie season was special. He scored 210 points in his first TEN NBA games… which became the third-highest mark in NBA history behind only Shaq and AI. Kobe called OJ the “total package”

But for any pro athlete under the heat of the spotlight… there are two sides to the equation: performing on the court and staying between the lines off of it… and that’s piece #2 OJ was his own worst enemy.

Because after a standout rookie season and looking like he was on the fast rise to superstardom… OJ Mayo averaged 17.5 points per game, yeah, still good but less than 18.2 in his rookie year…

In January of 2011, the league suspended Mayo for ten games after he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs…. which he later blamed on an energy drink, nonetheless, it was an offense that caused him to forfeit $405,109 of his salary for the season but it turns out…

He was already losing out on money because just EARLIER that very same month… OJ Mayo got into a pretty serious fight with Tony Allen, the heart and soul of the team, but not about basketball and maybe even worse than the Draymond Green punch. The Dallas Mavericks got him for a nice little bargain at just four million dollars in 2012.

And that’s when it got worse, out of nowhere, the NBA officially dismissed and disqualified OJ Mayo for violating the league’s anti-drug program… and banned Mayo from the NBA for two whole years. That was the first time something like that happened in the NBA in over a decade and the longest ban in the history of their sport. That was Piece #3, OJ Mayo got banned but the NBA was taking unprecedented measures.

There was only one other time that the NBA gave such a long ban, that was to Chris Anderson in 2006 who got permanently banned for a banned substance, but would eventually get reinstated and be back in the league 2 years later, and became an NBA champion, Birdman out here.

But if OJ Mayo was busted for the same thing and clearly still had the game to play at a decent clip in the NBA… why was he never seen again… and what really happened to him after that?

After being sent off by the NBA, OJ didn’t give up so quickly to eventually make his NBA return. In 2017, he said that he had his eyes fully set on an NBA return. He wanted the Bucks to give him another chance, saying that they did everything for him and that he feels that he owes them bigtime for that, hoping he’d get that one last chance at redemption

But unfortunately for Mayo, as he waited for the two years to pass by… the more everyone seemed to forget about him entirely. To the point that when his ban was over in 2018, no one called.