A look inside the Bulls’ 3-week minicamp bubble
The basketball inside the Chicago Bulls bubble has sometimes looked rusty, but that’s to be expected for the first team activities since March. Otherwise, the three-week Bulls minicamp, which wrapped up Tuesday, has gone off without a hitch.
Players seemed excited to be back on the court for the first time in six months. The new front office hired Billy Donovan as head coach and had a chance to evaluate players in person for the first time. The players got to experience a few team bonding activities. And most crucially, the Bulls avoided an outbreak of COVID-19.
To the NBA’s credit, the virus has remained under control throughout bubbles in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., and elsewhere as the league wraps up the NBA Finals and eight individual markets — the teams not invited to the restart —held group workouts.
“The league basically just handed us the manual. It felt like they gave us a ‘bubbles for dummies’ book or something and we had to put it together,” Chip Schaefer, the Bulls director of performance health, said with a laugh during a phone interview. “But it’s no joke. The guidelines are quite strict, as they see fit, and we had to put it together and follow them.”
Schaefer and Shaun Hickombottom, the Bulls senior manager of player and team services, took the lead in setting up acampuslike environment in two sites: the Advocate Center and a Chicago hotel.
Here’s how the Bulls bubble came together.
Health and safety protocols
The Bulls minicamp was split into two phases. During Phase A, which ran from Sept. 14-20, players were tested daily for COVID-19 but operated under the same rules they had during individual workouts at the Advocate Center earlier this summer.
Only eight players were allowed in the facility at a time, with each player limited to his own individual basket and one coach to rebound. Temperature and symptoms checks were administered daily. Staff were required to wear masks inside at all times in the facility, while players were expected to do so when they were not on the court. Coaches wore latex gloves while they rebounded.
Away from the facility, players operated under an honor system similar to the NFL and MLB. The team provided three meals a day, but players were allowed to use delivery services, such as Uber Eats or Postmates, and
advised to use contactless delivery.
Phase B began Sept. 21 and required the Bulls to move to a stricter campus-like environment.
The Bulls partnered with Quest Diagnostics to run their testing and shifted their setup from the practice facility to a conference room at the team hotel. There were precautions as the team moved inside the hotel, and the approximately 50 people
— including players, coaches and staff — were required to isolate in their rooms for 48 hours. Daily COVID-19 tests were administered room to room. Three meals per day were delivered to the door.
“By hour 36, I almost went crazy,” guard Zach LaVine said. “But I made it through. A bunch of video games, Netflix. I talked to my fiancee a lot.”
Team activities away from the court
The bubble can feel similar to a basketball summer camp, but after an initial wave of excitement, a sense of repetitiveness can develop quickly. Three weeks is much shorter than what players in Florida endured the past few months, but the Bulls wanted to be sure their players had options away from the court.
Inside the hotel, the Bulls created a game room for players with dart boards, air hockey, pingpong, a virtual golf swing simulator and PlayStation and Xbox game systems that included NBA 2K21, among others.
“I touched a golf club for the first time in my life, so that was pretty exciting,” forward Lauri Markkanen said. “It went better than I thought it would go. I can’t wait to play Arturas again in pingpong. I need to get him back. He got one from me. So I need to get a rematch on that.”
Luke Kornet serenaded teammates with his skills on the piano. The team set up a theater room filled with couches and a large projection screen to watch games, TV shows or movies. It’s also where the team watched film.
Players placed social justice causes at the center of the league’s bubble in Florida, and that extended to the Bulls bubble, where players wore T-shirts and warm-up gear with “Black Lives Matter” or “Vote” on the front and sat for a conversation with Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
The Bulls were allowed to host two activities outside of the hotel — a Chicago River Boat Cruise and a team golf outing — at which the team remained contained inside its bubble, using safety precautions such as face masks and distancing whenever possible.
After the bubble
The eight teams left out of the NBA’s restart faced the possibility they might not get back on the court for a regular-season game until sometime in 2021. That’s why the teams were eager to gettogether.
The idea went through a few iterations, including the potential of all eight teams creating a second bubble in Chicago, but Michele Roberts, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, insisted any environment would have to follow the same guidelines as the 22 teams in Florida.
The Bulls’ 2019-20 season stopped abruptly in March, and the start of their 2020-21 season is still unknown.