Los Angeles Lakers veteran Jared Dudley is offering new insight into living within the NBA bubble, noting that the extensive set of rules in place includes some even the players knew nothing about.
Dudley was interviewed by GQ on a variety of topics, with Dudley indicating that fans’ understanding of how detailed the NBA’s safety protocols are is undoubtedly limited.
“Not only can you not understand, but some of the rules we didn’t even know until we got here,” Dudley said. “It’s not like we knew exactly what we were getting into. The quarantine for four days, you heard? It’s seven days if you want your family members to come, if they don’t fly from the private jet from your city. So if my family is living in Atlanta, they’ve got to quarantine for an extra few days because they’re not flying from LA with the team plane. There was so much stuff. They could only come on one date, so now they can’t pick the date they want to come.
“We didn’t find all that information until we got here. We basically came here to finish the season, bring awareness to different social issues, and the money. Those are the three reasons. Because when it came to the actual bubble rules and what’s going on, man there was a lot of rules we didn’t even know until we got here.”
The level of attention the league has made toward preventing any sort of outbreak of the coronavirus has thus far been a success, given that no real issues have cropped up.
Violating any of the rules would likely hurt teams at the most important time of the season, but the rules are obviously restricting what would be typical living arrangements of teams during the season.
Dudley and the Lakers won’t play until at least Friday, given the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Monday night win over the Houston Rockets in Game 6 of their playoff series. The deciding game between the Thunder and Rockets will take place on Wednesday night, with the winner then facing the Lakers.
