Let’s Be Giannis

By: Jimmy (Unfair w/Jay and Jimmy)

7/12/2020

As we approach the eve of the NBA restart within the most unique and troubling season in league history, one of the questions that has been asked is will the conditions within the ‘Bubble’ make it easier or harder for a team to win the NBA championship?

While meeting with reporters at the team facility last week reigning MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo said, “I feel like this is going to be the toughest championship you could ever win.” He adds, “Because circumstances are really tough right now.”

Is he right? To understand this fairly let’s take a look at the unique challenges each team will face as they attempt to win a ring facing the current obstacles:

The four-month shutdown which began March 11th was created by the most obvious obstacle, the global coronavirus pandemic that has kept the world in an upside down position since it first emerged. To navigate the conditions produced by the pandemic, even within the Bubble, produces a mental strain not just with the specter of any player catching the virus and spreading it to others, but the haunting specter of this happening to one’s family who are still outside the Bubble.

To take a four-month forced hiatus from a professional sport in the middle of the season may well take the majority of the players equal to that amount of time or more to achieve peak physical conditioning and reignite the on-court chemistry the team built over the course of the season. No other teams in NBA history have had to do this.

On top of that, the tectonic plates of the racial, social, and political landscape continuously shift beneath the feet of the NBA. Many players and personnel have been participating on the frontline of the movement that seeks to end the horrible plague of institutional racism and many have struggled to compromise how they will continue to participate in the movement that is evolving at break-neck speed outside the Bubble while attempting to win a championship against the greatest basketball players in the world inside the Bubble.

And for the first time in modern NBA history there will be zero home court advantage in the playoffs. One might retort, “A neutral court makes it truly even for every team in every game.” And this may be true, but this advantage, which now will be absent, is often of crucial importance to playoff success, elevating a team in adverse circumstances to uplift themselves beyond what they thought were their limits. This I’d call an obstacle by subtraction, akin to a team having to overcome the absence of a valued role player in a playoff atmosphere where every inch, second, and bucket is worth more. At some point, this will have a noticeable adverse effect for some team, most likely at the worst possible time.

They say ‘home is where the heart is’. Players will be unable to retreat to the sanctity and comfort of their homes to spend time with their family and trusted friends which is to be without a valuable emotional and psychological resource for a time within the Bubble when the pressure and intensity is at its highest. No team has faced this type of isolation to win an NBA championship before.

This is a large swath of what we are all asking the players and coaches to endure and overcome for our entertainment and for what could be the champagne soaked glory of our favorite team were they to win it all (my apologies if your team was not invited to the Bubble).

Whichever team endures and overcomes all this and more to win the coveted championship, the players, coaches, and traveling personnel of that team deserve two championship rings: one for overcoming the obstacles on the court within the Bubble, and another for overcoming the obstacles off the court outside the Bubble.