Prologue: Before the Bubble
Rudy Gobert felt panicked and scared. And so he did what you do when you feel panicked and scared: He tried to call his mother, Corinne, but he was having trouble reaching her. “She was sleeping because it was about 4 a.m. in France at the time,” says Gobert. “But I was calling her every 10 minutes to make sure I was the first person she talked to, before she saw the news on Facebook.”
It was early March, and Gobert hadn't been feeling well. He'd been in bed at the 21c Museum Hotel in Oklahoma City, getting ready to watch his Jazz teammates face the Thunder. He was showing symptoms that he says he's had “a thousand times” in his life, symptoms he believed he could just sweat out, drink some ginger tea, and be right back healthy. Only this time, that wasn't quite the case. When the game was about to start, someone came out onto the court to talk to the officials. “I was like, Oh, shit,” Gobert recalls. “Thirty seconds later they called me and said I was positive for COVID-19.” Gobert, as it turns out, learned that he had the coronavirus at the same time that the rest of the world did.
Which is why he was frantically calling his mother, especially since there was a humiliating viral video circulating that night of him touching a bunch of reporters' microphones as a joke earlier in the week—a video he says does not accurately portray who he is. “I had to tell her that I was okay,” he recalls. “I would always tell her that I'm good even when I'm not, because me not being good would hurt her literally more than me.” Gobert wound up being the first NBA domino to topple, and within hours commissioner Adam Silver would announce that the rest of the season was suspended indefinitely. Basketball would not officially resume until 141 days later, on July 30, inside what would come to be called the NBA bubble, in Orlando, Florida: the daring, temporary, artificial home of the world's greatest basketball players.
Chapter I: This Must Be the Place
In early July, 22 NBA teams descended on Disney World in central Florida to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime experiment. More than 300 athletes boarded a series of repurposed Mickey Mouse tour buses and were scattered among three different hotels—the Gran Destino, the Yacht Club, and the Grand Floridian—each designed to cater to the needs and wishes of the kinds of people who travel vast distances for the immersive family fun of the Magic Kingdom.
It was a strange time for the NBA to be restarting. The George Floyd protests were still going strong across the country, and a lot of people—including players—were questioning whether we even needed basketball. I flew into Orlando on July 12 from New York, a city that, at the time, appeared to be on its way to successfully containing the spread of the virus. I was there to cover the NBA for Bleacher Report and Turner Sports, and was one of the few media members granted “Tier 1” clearance, meaning we were to be tested every single day and, once we completed a seven-day quarantine, were allowed to inhabit the same spaces as the players themselves.
But my experience inside got off to a rocky start. I was assigned a fourth-floor room next door to the Gran Destino, a vaguely Southwest-themed space with lots of natural light and pictures of cacti on the walls. I was tested the night I arrived, and by the following afternoon, a doctor had called and told me I had tested positive for the virus. I was shocked and scared but mostly confused, because I had rarely left my apartment and had tested negative a few days prior. So I got retested and spent the next two days incredibly worried. (This time, it was me calling my mom crying.) After more tests, the doctor called again to tell me that the initial result was a false positive.
After quarantining for a week and passing all the required medical exams, I was cleared to finally enter the bubble—ostensibly the safest place on the planet, thanks to daily testing, mandated masks, and strictly enforced social distancing from the outside world.
When people ask me what the bubble was like, I tell them it felt like summer camp, except most of the campers were multimillionaires and a considerable percentage of them were seven feet tall. There were times I'd be heading to the Maya Grill for lunch (my go-to was the chicken nuggets, vegetable pasta, and a strawberry-lemonade Popsicle) and I'd see the Lakers' LeBron James and Anthony Davis casually ride past me on their bikes. Or I'd spy Kyle Lowry of the Raptors, walking alone across the same bridge every morning to go grab breakfast. In a surreal way, the campus granted athletes the rare freedom to move through the world unbothered. No security details, no fans stopping them for photos. It's something I imagine a lot of them haven't been able to experience since they were teenagers.
Inside, we devised all kinds of ways to pass the time. Once, I played Heads Up! (the charades-like game where you hold your phone up to your forehead) with Kemba Walker of the Boston Celtics at the end of an interview. The answer on the screen was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,” and the clue he gave me was “They be flying on brooms and shit.” Ja Morant of the Grizzlies and I would play Connect Four on the iPhone (he still hasn't beaten me), and Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook—who were traded for each other before the season began—would team up and play spades on their phones against Chris's brother, C.J., and his mom, Robin. Westbrook in particular was a model bubble citizen. He always made sure his hotel room was “clean and in good shape,” and he reportedly left an $8,000 tip for the housekeepers. (When we spoke, Westbrook confirmed he wrote a thank-you note and left a good tip, but wouldn't confirm the amount: “The money doesn't matter. I just like to do the right thing. That's it.”)
Perhaps because of the strange environment, a few of the players seemed to relax and let down their guard. George Hill of the Milwaukee Bucks said he missed the national anthem before a game against the Magic because he was busy taking “a shit,” something he tells me he does every pregame when there's six minutes left on the clock. He joins the layup line, shoots a single layup, and then, like clockwork, sprints off to the bathroom.
All the actual basketball took place about 10 minutes away. After games and practices, the players would race to the bus in order to get back to their hotels first. (Bam Adebayo was always dejected when he was late to the first bus and had to wait for the second one.) Once back at the hotels, the guys would mostly spend the nights playing cards (after Heat practices, I'd sometimes hear Jimmy Butler yell, “We playing Phase 10 tonight?!”) or drinking together at the hotel bar.
Like a lot of people in lockdown in the outside world, players spent their free time inside the bubble drinking. And seemingly at the center of it all was CJ McCollum of the Portland Trail Blazers, who became something of the NBA's unofficial source for wine. McCollum stacked his hotel room with cases of his own Pinot Noir blend, McCollum Heritage 91, keeping the thermostat at a cool 65 degrees. He gifted dozens of bottles to players, and CJ's wine became a hot-ticket item—a bubble grail. Kawhi Leonard once stopped CJ to ask questions about the Pinot Noir and say he was a huge fan. (“I got the endorsement from Mr. Leonard!”) As was Anthony Davis, who, according to McCollum, stood next to him at the free-throw line during a Round 1 playoff game to tell him: “Thanks for that wine. That shit was good.”
But no one was a bigger fan than Damian Lillard. McCollum's backcourt running mate said Heritage 91 was a magic elixir, the good-luck charm behind his historic bubble hot streak. Every time Lillard drank some, he'd go out and drop 50 on the other team, so he made it a point to incorporate McCollum Heritage 91 into his nightly routine. According to CJ, Dame was like, “ ‘Don't bring me nothing besides that Heritage—I only want to drink the Heritage!’ So I was bringing him it, and we was drinking it for, like, a streak.”
This being central Florida in the summer, players would spend a lot of their free time poolside. The Houston Rockets would ritually gather at the Grand Floridian pool to eat and drink, and James Harden would rave about how good the hotel's hot dogs were. (Teammate Austin Rivers offered a similar review: “That shit almost changed my life.”) One night at the pool, players from the Rockets and the Trail Blazers—two longtime rivals—both happened to be watching the Clippers play the Mavericks on their iPads. The Blazers' stream was a couple of seconds ahead, and the Portland guys were shouting and hollering before the Rockets players knew what was happening. “So we turned off our iPad and went over to where they were at,” says Rivers. “We're all talking like, Nah, this guy's going to take that. Oh, no, they can't leave him open.… You can see guys, like, delving into the game. It wasn't about, you know, Dame versus Russ. Like everybody's just cool, you know what I mean?”
The collegial atmosphere made it easy for the guys to bond, and friendships new and old blossomed in Orlando. Some of the O.G.s used it as an opportunity to connect with the next generation: like Carmelo Anthony, a 17-year veteran, who said his most memorable conversation took place over drinks at the Yacht Club with younger players Kyle Kuzma and Devin Booker. Melo told them that they were the “future of the NBA” and to “start using your voices more and stop relying on us to do all the talking while y'all sit back.” When Lakers guard Danny Green won his third championship, he says, his old coach Gregg Popovich sent him a text: “Tell LeBron and AD I said congrats as well, but tell them to play a little more defense.” Meanwhile, a few players used the new proximity to let go of old grudges. Raptors president Masai Ujiri said his favorite moment off the court happened while he was on the sidelines, watching his team play the Lakers, and one of his former players came up to him. “I'm sitting down there, and I see this person walking straight to me with a blue tracksuit,” says Ujiri. It was DeMar DeRozan, who had spent nine seasons with the Raptors before he was traded to the Spurs for Kawhi Leonard. The trade had left DeRozan feeling “extremely hurt” and betrayed but earned the Raptors the franchise's first championship. “And he walks up to me,” Ujiri continues, “and he gives me a big, big hug. This was really the first time that we've really had that kind of contact since the trade. I left the game and I felt that we had crossed a certain…we'd reached a new place.”
My whole time in the bubble, I never once saw Jayson Tatum of the Celtics without his teammates Kemba Walker and Javonte Green. It was natural for players to form cliques, but the trio were inseparable. Tatum says his favorite night in the bubble was when he was sipping a drink (he rotated between a Hennessy and pineapple, a Crown Royal Apple, and a Moscato) and Walker said he had a confession, something that he had to get off his chest. It was a revelation that brought the already close teammates even closer, according to Tatum: “Kemba was like, ‘Yo, before I met you, I thought you were just…like, the epitome of a light-skinned dude with good hair who went to Duke. But being around you, you're just a country dude from St. Louis!’ ”
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Chapter II: Groundhog Day
Pro athletes are already creatures of habit, but the limitations of the bubble forced a lot of the people inside it to adopt routines in order to preserve their sanity.
For example, every day at 5 a.m., inside room 950 in the Gran Destino (where all the top-seeded teams stayed), Masai Ujiri would wake up, read his book, hop on the Peloton, and work out before heading down for breakfast. He thought nothing of his daily ritual until one morning, several weeks into the bubble, when he got a text from another former player of his: “Morning boss, you good up there?”
The text was from Kawhi Leonard—Finals MVP with the Raptors, now a star on the Clippers—who was staying in room 850, directly below his old boss. Ujiri had been waking Kawhi up with his noisy workouts for weeks, but Kawhi was reluctant to say anything.
Ujiri told Kawhi that he would stop for the time being and joked that he would continue again when the Raptors met the Clippers in the Finals, messing with Kawhi's sleep. Kawhi responded with the kind of trash talk that's best read aloud in Kawhi's dry monotone: “Haha, you know the saying ‘Don't poke the bear’? I'm gonna call the NBA on you…get you out the bubble.”
Everyone coped with the monotony as best they could. One small way George Hill managed it was by eating the same exact breakfast every morning: a bacon-egg-and-cheese croissant with a hash brown casserole; a double serving of bacon; a coffee; and a tangerine juice. Doc Rivers, who was head coach of the Clippers, put the endless repetition to me this way: “It was Groundhog Day, I swear to God it was. Every morning I woke up, I did the [COVID-19 check-in] app, ran downstairs, did the testing. Went to watch film with my coaches, watch film with the players, practice, and rode my bike. And then I was back in the room. Every day.”
“You really just had to accept the fact that, man, I'm going to see these four walls every day,” says Tatum.
The isolation also took a toll on players mentally, especially with everything going on in the outside world—and here they were, hermetically sealed inside a Disney resort. Many of them had an especially hard time being away from their families. “I didn't tell anybody, but I was going through mental problems,” says Ja Morant. He says his daughter, Kaari, is the joy of his life, all “light and energy,” and he missed her first birthday while inside the bubble. (“I wanted to just sit in a room that day by myself.”) The first time he heard her clearly say the word “Dada,” he was talking to her on FaceTime. Her mom would ask, “Where's Dada?” and Kaari would point at the screen: “Dada!”
The moment broke him.
“Some don't really know how serious that can be,” Morant says when I ask him how hard it was to be confined in the bubble. “And, you know, a lot of people want to make jokes and stuff until they actually go through it.”
Chris Paul, the head of the NBA players' association and a 15-year veteran, said he similarly struggled with being away from his family, especially when he missed his daughter's eighth birthday. “You ever seen on social media the thing that says, ‘Make sure you check on your strong friends’?” Paul asks me. “A lot of times, it's the guys who may seem like they got everything together, you know? For me, shoot—I needed somebody to talk to at times.”
But for all the loneliness, for all the outside life that the players missed, there were some moments of real joy inside the bubble, memories they say they'll never forget. There was Morant, taking his first legal drink—a bottle of Don Julio 1942 tequila—when his teammates and coaches threw him a surprise party for his 21st birthday. There was LeBron and AD, rushing back to the hotel after a win so they could celebrate their victory with a big glass of red. There were the Houston Rockets and how, after practice, they'd all look at one another and shout, “Lil Yachty! Lil Yachty!”—which meant they were going to the boat to drink. “There were a lot of really good times in the bubble,” Paul adds. “As much as people talk about how tough it was to be away from their families and stuff, to me there were probably a lot of better times than not.”
A few players took the isolation in stride and just appreciated the quietude. Around 7:30 every night Austin Rivers says he would sit out on his balcony, put on some headphones, and take a moment for himself. “My room had a view of the little magic castle or whatever,” he says. “It was nice.”
Whenever the sun went down, Bam Adebayo would take a left out of the back lobby of the Gran Destino and go for a long walk along the perimeter of the hotel's campus to clear his head and “get a somewhat different look from Groundhog Day,” he says. He went on his walk after losing Game 6 of the NBA Finals, even though the route took him past the Three Bridges restaurant, where the Lakers were celebrating their championship win over the Heat. “At that point you realize the season's over,” says Adebayo. “That was part of what was going through my mind: This is the last walk for my routine. Of being in the bubble.”
Chapter III: Everything but Basketball
I remember being at Fred VanVleet's post-practice press conference after Jacob Blake was shot in Kenosha, Wisconsin. VanVleet's eyes were glazed, and he didn't want to take any questions about basketball. When it was my turn to speak, I simply asked him how he was doing; the games just didn't feel important in the moment. VanVleet collected himself and gave an answer that was at once raw and multidimensional: He said he was heartbroken and had survivor's remorse. That he felt isolated in the bubble. That people can't underestimate the trauma that comes from watching videos on their phones of Black men dying and seeing comments that argued they should have just listened to the police. He told me about his father, who was killed when VanVleet was young.
It was a heavy moment for all of us, and when that press conference was over, I looked down at my phone and saw I had a text from Fred asking me how I was doing. My answer was the same as his: I was heartbroken too.
Most of the players felt the same way. On August 26, a few days after Blake's shooting, George Hill asked for a breakfast meeting with head coach Mike Budenholzer and the rest of the coaching staff. Hill ordered the same breakfast he always did, with his double serving of bacon and a tangerine juice, and told them that he “didn't feel comfortable playing” and wasn't going to.
“That was the last thing on my mind,” says Hill. “I didn't want to do it.” It wasn't just Blake who sparked his decision to sit out: It was Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who crossed state lines into Wisconsin and shot three protesters, leaving two dead and one seriously injured. “We let that kid go all the way back home,” Hill tells me. “They didn't slam him on the ground. They didn't put him in handcuffs. They didn't do anything. They let him go all the way back to Illinois and arrested him the next day. If it was the other way around, would that have happened? I don't think so.”
Hill had seen enough, and his coaches informed the Bucks of his decision to sit out. One of those players was Sterling Brown, who was tased and arrested by Milwaukee police in 2018 over an alleged parking violation. For Brown, this was personal. It wasn't long before the Milwaukee Bucks organization collectively made the unprecedented decision not to play in Game 5 against the Orlando Magic, effectively bringing the NBA to a halt.
And if George Hill hadn't sat out, there was a strong possibility that a league-wide strike still would have taken place. The Raptors were set to play the Celtics the day after the Bucks decided to stay in the locker room. While the Bucks were deliberating, Raptors players Fred VanVleet and Kyle Lowry quietly met with members of the Celtics to discuss what they should do, and Masai Ujiri ran into Celtics coach Brad Stevens, and the two talked about not playing. “It was going to happen, to be honest,” says Ujiri. If it hadn't been the Bucks who initiated the strike, it probably would have been the Raptors and the Celtics.
Meanwhile, players inside the bubble were all wondering the same thing: What can we do? A few wanted to end the season then and there. They all had a decision to make, and so later that evening, the remaining teams agreed to convene at the Gran Destino for a historic meeting to discuss what was next.
Chapter IV: The Meeting
The players all gathered in what was described to me as “a big-ass room.” Media weren't present; it was players and coaching staff only. “It was a bunch of circles—each team was in a circle,” says Austin Rivers. “And then other players started going to other circles.”
“I was worried that night because it was more emotional than it was anything else,” Doc Rivers says. “It was great to see, because I don't think people feel like guys who are millionaires care. But I saw guys with tears in their eyes, guys with anger, guys who were mad. Guys who wanted to do something. And then I also saw a bunch of us not knowing what to do.”
“It was like chaos,” says Austin.
“We were just throwing ideas back and forth off of each other,” says George Hill. “Why we should play, why we shouldn't. What's going on in the world? What are we standing for?”
At some point, money became a point of contention. The fact of the matter was there were guys in the bubble in different financial situations, and not everyone could afford to forgo the season. A few of them were max players, with multiyear contracts in the hundreds of millions, while other guys were just trying to carve out a career for themselves. “It definitely felt that a lot of what was talked about was the social injustice part,” says Hill. “And then there was a handful that would talk about the financial loss. A lot of us were saying, ‘What does money mean if you have no humanity?’ And a lot of [other people] were saying, ‘We want the money.’ So sometimes money trumps humanity, I guess. But that's what it was, and I don't fault anybody. Everyone has a different life, and everyone has different values.” Carmelo Anthony put it another way: “We want change around the world, but then you start talking about money? Money is the root of all evil.”
Pretty much the whole room was upset that the Bucks decided not to play without informing the other teams. Multiple players told me that everyone felt like one team made the decision for the rest of the league. “Then Jaylen [Brown of the Celtics] stood up and said that the Milwaukee Bucks don't owe anybody no apology,” Hill recalls. “They did what they thought was right, and that's what it was. It was very special. As a young man himself, to stand up and say that? It meant a lot.”
Everyone was looking for leadership. The Clippers and the Lakers were so adamant about doing something that at one point they just walked right out. “We were just willing to make a stand, willing to put it all on the line,” says Lakers guard Danny Green, “even though we knew we had a really good chance at being the last team standing.”
Tensions were high, and with teams storming out, the night ended without any real resolution.
The following morning, members of the NBPA executive committee had a phone call with owners and executives across the league. Some of the most powerful people in sports were on that call, including Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan. “Michael was a calming influence,” Mavericks owner Mark Cuban tells me. “I think that was really impactful. Because in the back of everybody's minds, people think, ‘Republicans buy sneakers too.’ And here was Michael Jordan stepping out and really connecting to players and really saying, ‘Okay, we're all in this together. What do we need to do?’ ”
It was LeBron James who had the final statement on the call. “I thought [LeBron] was really compelling,” Cuban recalls. “He talked about how we need to be able to connect to young African American kids. What really stuck with me was when he said a lot of kids where he grew up can't afford cable and that the only way to watch our games is on cable. And we have a challenge [in addressing] those types of issues and lifting people up, so that it's not about cable or watching the NBA on cable but more about: How do we help these kids improve where they are in life?”
The players and owners landed on a plan. Not only would the league commit to making social justice a cornerstone of its mission going forward, but it would form an official coalition within the NBA that, per a joint press release, focused on “a broad range of issues, including increasing access to voting, promoting civic engagement, and advocating for meaningful police and criminal justice reform.” This coalition would be composed of players and owners, with hundreds of millions of dollars behind it.
And it was the players who made it all happen. They were fighting for real change, something they could point back to, something that would have a lasting impact beyond their time in Orlando. And once they had that plan in place, the games resumed.
Chapter V: The Right Space at the Right Time
By the end of August, basketball had resumed and continued at a high level—and a few breakout stars were playing out of their minds, including Jamal Murray, who competed in a custom pair of Adidas sneakers painted with the faces of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that he wore into the ground. ("I think the bubble just showed who the real hoopers were," says Murray.) But I was beginning to feel a sense of exhaustion creep in. Guys seem fatigued. Fewer players lingered in the common areas after practices or games. “It was a lot tougher than I ever thought it would be,” says Doc Rivers of his time inside.
Doc's Clippers came into the postseason with lofty aspirations, and it seemed like a foregone conclusion that we'd get a groundbreaking L.A. vs. L.A. Western Conference Finals. But the bubble was not kind to the Clippers, and Paul George in particular was heavily criticized for his playoff struggles. A press conference following a win over the Mavericks provided a little clarity: George said he was feeling “anxiety” and “a little bit of depression from being locked in here.” It was notable because it was the first time any of us had witnessed George be vulnerable. “PG, clearly [the bubble] was bothering him,” says Doc Rivers. “And because he's such a quiet guy to begin with, I honestly didn't see it until I heard about it and I saw it. And then it was real for me.”
It was up to the players to be there for one another. During the Finals, when Danny Green missed an open three at the top of the key to clinch a Lakers championship at the end of Game 5, he and his fiancée started to receive death threats online, which made an already difficult situation even harder. “It was one of those nights that you don't sleep much,” Green tells me. He was thankful for the brotherhood of players who had his back, including George, who reached out to Green directly and also posted a message to his Instagram Stories: Stay blessed bro…One of the best guns out there.
That realness hit us all at different times. You're in a place that's safe from the coronavirus, doing the exact same thing every day, and it's easy to feel like you aren't a part of the outside world. The problem with that feeling is that everyone you love is in the outside world and their lives are moving at a pace that yours is not.
That realness hit me when I learned about my great-uncle, Lou Brock, who played for the St. Louis Cardinals. He passed away back home in Missouri. The day after he died, Jayson Tatum—St. Louis's very own and someone I've known since he was 15—wore his Cardinals-colorway Jordan 34 shoes and wrote “R.I.P. Lou Brock” on the side. After the game, he found me to make sure I was okay, and it was one of the few times inside the bubble I remember feeling at home.
A couple of players said one of the rawest moments happened during that big meeting, when Houston Rockets assistant coach John Lucas launched into a speech and talked about how stressful the bubble was for everybody. It had been particularly stressful for him, as someone who's struggled with alcoholism. “I know most people in here are just drinking every night because there's nothing else to do,” he said. “And at some point a lot of people are going to turn into alcoholics.”
The moment hit hard for a lot of the players. “We're [in the bubble] going crazy, the testosterone levels are through the roof, no one's significant other is there, and the single men are probably really going crazy because they're used to just doing what they want,” says McCollum. “So it was just like a lot of tension and stress. And then [John] just comes out and starts saying what everybody was thinking.” When his speech concluded, the players all erupted and gave Lucas a standing ovation.
For me, there was one moment in the bubble that sticks out above all the others. It was the week that Jacob Blake was shot, and I was sitting outside the Coronado Springs convention center ballroom waiting for the Raptors' practice to end. Masai Ujiri walked up to me and another reporter unprompted and said, “We should have never come to the bubble.”
Ujiri was emotional. He is intimately familiar with how it feels to be wronged by police just because you're a Black man. The week prior, body cam footage from the 2019 NBA Finals had surfaced, showing a white police officer grabbing and shoving Masai as he tried to step on the court after his Raptors beat the Warriors for the championship. There it was, plain as day: Even a powerful Black man, the president of an NBA team, wasn't safe from being brutalized by the police.
Ujiri knew he had to show his players before they saw it elsewhere. “I cried when I showed the players my video,” he says. “And I cried when I got the video from the lawyer. And when my wife watched it [with me]… That was emotional, and I cried again.” In hindsight, Ujiri says he doesn't regret returning to the bubble: “Honestly, Taylor, sports brings us all together. We have the ability to address these issues head-on and galvanize and hope for change and try to create that change. We have to be in that space, and the bubble was that space at that time.”
I left the bubble for good right before the Conference Finals to attend my uncle's funeral. As I passed the cartoon signs on the ride to the airport, the sense that I was there for a moment in history finally hit me. Here were these players fighting for equality, fighting with each other for a championship while fighting for each other. These were men who were constantly checking on each other, who showed us all that while being great is impressive, being good can be just as meaningful.
“When I first got out and got home, I'm like, ‘Damn, what am I supposed to do now?’ ” Jayson Tatum tells me. “I got no plans. I've got nowhere to go. I'm not waking up to get tested every morning and check my heart monitor and take my temperature. The first couple days were weird.
“I was like, ‘Damn, do I miss the bubble?’ ”
Taylor Rooks is a host and reporter for Bleacher Report and Turner Sports.
A version of this story originally appears in the December/January 2021 issue with the title “The Most Magical Place on Earth”.
