This NBA season has been an NBA season like we’ve never seen before. The games were halted back in March as Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus, and it would be months before the players would take the floor again — and doing so in a bubble environment with no fans or travel.
For the most part, the NBA’s bubble setup at the Walt Disney World complex in Orlando has been a success. There hasn’t been a positive test within the bubble, and the quality of basketball has been great.
But NBA Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen still wouldn’t call the bubble true NBA basketball.
In an interview with Business Insider, Pippen said that he’s viewed these bubble games more in line with pickup basketball:
Well, I’m going to be honest. It’s not NBA basketball. It’s not the hard grind. It’s not the travel. It’s not the fans. It’s not the distractions. Really, to me, it’s pickup basketball. It’s going to the gym. Yeah, you already got your team. Y’all practicing together. But it’s a more of a pickup type of basketball game, because there’s no fans in the stands. So there is no distraction. There’s no real noise. There’s no pressure on the players, you know. Prime example: I looked at Rondo. Rondo ain’t made three pointers in his whole NBA career. Now, all of a sudden, he’s in a bubble, he’s probably a 50% three point shooter. I haven’t even checked the stats.
But that’s just something that I consider making the game so easy, because Rondo can’t score inside of an arena, when you got depth perception. Like, there’s a whole lot of things that make the NBA hard. The bubble makes the NBA easy to me. There’s no travel. That’s the killer itself. So you’re sleeping in the same bed every night. You’re walking to the gym. You’re not having to go with a 25 to 50 minute bus ride to an arena. You’re not having to probably even sit in the arena for two hours before the game, talk to the media, deal with all the outside stuff that they’re trying to pull you in to make some distraction and, you know, throw the team in a loop. So it’s a different game, but it’s very entertaining.
While it’s true that travel, fans and external factors do take a toll on players, that doesn’t necessarily make the bubble games less significant or easier. Every player is playing in the same environment, so the factors that aid Rajon Rondo — in his example — would also aid his competition.
It’s still NBA basketball at its truest form, and that counts for something.
[jwplayer jcSKtDmM-q2aasYxh]