The Lakers have signed Logan Paul…and KSI’s sports drink brand PRIME as the team’s official sports drink.

Philadelphia 76ers v Toronto Raptors
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On Tuesday, the Lakers surprised everyone by announcing that they had agreed to a deal with Logan Paul. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, depending on how good a 3-point shooter he is, it’s a deal with Paul and KSI’s sports drink company, PRIME, and not a 10-day contract.

There’s a lot to unpack with this one, but nothing more imperative than the fact that KSI is very clearly photoshopped into these pictures. For one, he’s in the exact same pose in both pictures and, for two, even a cursory look will show how clear it is he was not at the team’s facility for these photos.

This is also pretty funny for those deep in the weeds who paid close attention to D’Angelo Russell’s pressers, particularly in the playoffs last season. D’Lo is sponsored by Coco 5 and tried multiple times last season to put his drink on the table for his pressers but was repelled by the Lakers since the team was not an official sponsor.

On Tuesday, D’Lo initially tweeted and subsequently deleted a tweet about a collaboration between Coco 5 and PRIME.

For those unaware, PRIME is a drink that was only started in 2022 by Paul and KSI, two of YouTube’s biggest stars. Backed by their popularity, they have very, very quickly become one of the most popular brands in the world, having signed deals with Arsenal, Barcelona and Bayern Munich in soccer, UFC and WWE as whole brands/leagues/companies and a number of athletes, ranging from Erling Haaland to Patrick Mahomes and Israel Adesanya.

It’s fair to mention that Paul has a laundry list of past controversies, which you can find across multiple sections of his Wikipedia. To his credit, many of them were years ago, and he has, at least recently, seemed to avoid controversy, largely speaking. That’s a lot of qualifiers, though.

To me, the one obvious question is why PRIME instead of, say, Body Armor, a brand so many fans associate with Kobe Bryant. The answer to this, as is the case with basically everything in life, is probably money. Ultimately, it probably matters little as I could not even tell you who the Lakers previous official sports drink brand was or if they had one.