Boston veteran forward Gordon Hayward blogs about life in the ‘bubble’

Veteran Boston Celtics forward Gordon Hayward shared his blogging about life in the Disney NBA campus on Thursday morning.

Boston Celtics star forward Gordon Hayward spent at least a little of his downtime at the Disney NBA campus blogging about what it was like there, creating a record for posterity on his first days in the ‘bubble’ he shared on Twitter Thursday morning.

Stuck on-site with the rest of the 22 teams participating in the resumed 2019-20 NBA season, Hayward and the rest of the Celtics roster have had to fill a good chunk of the day with whatever activities they could muster — whether provided by Disney at the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex in Lake Buena Vista, Florida or of their own designs.

“It’s been a couple weeks since we reported to Orlando to enter the NBA bubble site,” offered Hayward, “and now that we’ve got our feet on the ground and before we begin games, I wanted to give everyone a glimpse of what life is like from my perspective.”

He of course misses his family, who he keeps in regular touch with via telepresence.

While Hayward is here at Disney, Robyn will head back to Indiana to be closer to both his and her families, which his girls are excited about.

“As far as things go here, it’s good. I didn’t really know what to expect coming in. This bubble thing is very complex, and it’s pretty impressive. Everything the NBA and Disney have done to get this to work so far, just with scheduling practices, activities, transportation and the different rooms, all while maintaining the safety of the players and the staff and the people that are here, has been great. I think they’ve done a really good job of organizing this whole thing.”

Of course, one of the first things notorious gamer Hayward noticed was the internet.

“They knew we were going to be streaming and gaming and all that stuff so they did a good job hooking it up and it’s been pretty solid,” he related.

The food, however, had left something to be desired; “They knew we were going to be streaming and gaming and all that stuff so they did a good job hooking it up and it’s been pretty solid.”

Settling was easy, and Hayward slept or gamed through much of his initial quarantine.

He also related that testing was daily, accompanied by a questionnaire to catch symptoms a young athlete might dismiss as unworthy of concern.

He also shared how those funky “magic band” bracelets work.

“Everyone has a magic band, and the magic band is your room key. But you also have to get it scanned before you leave and go to practice, and when you come back. If you leave and go to golf or do some other leisure activity they have set up and come back, you have to get that scanned. And if you didn’t fill out your questionnaire, or if you didn’t get tested, or you had a positive test or whatever it is, then it’ll alert you right then when you leave.”

“And at that point in time, I think they’d take you to quarantine, or have you fill out whatever you didn’t fill out. So you always have to have that magic band on you,” he added.

And besides training and practice (and gaming), Hayward hasn’t done much else; “I golfed one time with Kemba, JT, and Grant.

I’m not a very good golfer, so I really just went to hang out with them. Other than that, I’ve just hung out outside a little bit by the pool.”

“Our days are very structured so there’s not as much free time as you’d expect to do whatever you want,” he explained.

“You wake up, go eat, come back, hang out for a little bit. Maybe you have practice in the morning or early afternoon. You come back. You go eat again. Get treatment. You have a meeting. You come back, you eat again, you go get tested. You go back to your room. So there hasn’t been that much free time. There’s small pockets throughout the day of free time, but not much.”

As for the practices?

He has opinions about those too:

“The days when we have practice at night are definitely the worst, because you’re basically sitting around all day,” said Hayward.

“So on a day like that I’ll get up, go eat, then go and get treatment. Then I have a window where I’m not really doing much, but with practice later you can’t do too much, because you’re gearing up for practice. So you go eat lunch, get tested and then wait for meetings and practice. When we practice at nine in the morning, by the time you get back and eat lunch and then test and do treatment, it’s like three or four or sometimes five o’clock already and the day is almost over. So those days go by really quick.”

“When it’s all said and done you don’t have that much time to do whatever you want. They’re keeping us on a very structured schedule here,” added the Butler product.

And the elephant in the room — how Boston looks after such a long layoff — was addressed by Hayward as well.

“Right now we’re definitely deep in the process of finding our rhythm and finding our groove to get back to where we were. Each day it’s getting better,” he noted.

“Obviously, I think everyone was a little bit rusty initially trying to work back into things. But so far, it’s been good. There have definitely been those moments where something clicks and it feels like it did back in March. With some of the play calls, once you do them and you watch them on film, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember this now. I got it.’ And you get back into that basketball mode.”

“That’s a lot of fun,” suggested Hayward.

“The thing that stands out for us right now is just the amount of talent that we have,” observed the veteran forward.

“It always stands out when we have practices, because everyone kind of has their moment where they seem to take over a little bit and, it just shows how much depth and talent we have. [Jayson Tatum] looks good. He’s just an unbelievably talented scorer for such a young player. He’s been knocking down shots and doing what he does. Same goes for Jaylen [Brown]. He’s so talented for being so young and already plays the game at his own pace and does such a good job. It’s good to see them not missing a beat.”

“We all have seen those guys play really well over their careers already, and over this last year in particular. So it’s good to be back with them,” opined Hayward.

And for the millions of Celtics fans who have been without basketball, it’s almost unreal to see live basketball happening again — even if the backdrop in the state of Florida is enough to introduce some existential dread into the backdrop.

But all things considered, the so-called ‘bubble’ is off to a great start — and we’re less than 24 hours away from Celtics basketball being played again.

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