NBA star Dwight Howard is clearly at least a year (probably two) late to the time when celebrities and star athletes could drop some low-effort NFTs and sell out the whole batch immediately. After announcing his "Ballers" project on January 20, offering 3,000 NFTs for a mint price of 2 AVAX (~$60) apiece, he only managed to sell about 300 of them within a day or so.After the dismal launch, Howard tried a few somewhat desperate-seeming moves to try to attract interest in the project: promising to send free crypto to some holders, redoing all the art after criticism of its quality, and slashing the NFT supply to 1,500. Despite all that, only 465 NFTs have sold (15% of the original supply, netting Howard 930 AVAX — around $28,400).
The flop was so bad that a member of the team behind the Avalanche blockchain put out a tweet distancing themselves from the project, stating that they didn't even know about the project until he announced it. "Gone are the days that individuals/Brands with large followings can just drop IP related NFTs out of nowhere and expect it to do well," they wrote, seemingly criticizing Howard's approach by writing that NFT creators must "mak[e] sure to do it in an organic way with proper intentions."