San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
In the bubble, sanity as vital as sanitizer
Sequestered players’ mental health to be a top priority
After a layoff of four-plus months, Spurs center Jakob
Poeltl isn’t sure what kind of stamina he will have once the NBA resumes its season in late July.
He can’t be certain he will be in any kind of basketball rhythm once the games begin again.
As for the off hours players expect to spend sequestered in a hotel room across the league campus in Orlando?
Poeltl figures he’s been preparing for that part for weeks now.
“I like to think I’ve practiced it for the last three months,” Poeltl said. “I’m pretty good at being on my own.”
Rest assured, not every player who will be headed to the NBA bubble at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex feels as at ease with solitude.
Players are bound to miss their families and their children, as well as the usual accoutrements that come with living life as normal.
While much of the outside focus on the NBA’s planned restart has centered on physical health — keeping players from catching COVID-19 or blowing out a knee — the players themselves have spent more time discussing their mental health.
“I think when people hear health and safety, a lot of times people think about injury or they just think about COVID,” said Oklahoma City guard Chris Paul,
who is president of the National Basketball Players Association. “While both are important, I think mental health is the biggest thing that a lot of us players think of first.
“Although a lot of us always look like we’re all together or that we’re fine, that’s not always the case, especially coming out of quarantine. … And now we’re going into an even tougher situation.”
The Spurs’ DeMar DeRozan knows this dynamic well.
Over the past several seasons, he has been open in discussing mental health issues. Paul mentioned DeRozan and Cleveland’s Kevin Love as players who have helped shine a light on mental health concerns across the league.
Mental health care will be as important when the NBA enters its Orlando bubble.
“You’re taking guys who have been with their families every single day for the last few months, and all of a sudden separating everybody into this one confined space,” DeRozan said. “And taking away a lot of the joyful things we do outside of basketball that we won’t be able to do. It will be something for every single player when it comes to mental health.”
The idea of being separated from family while a pandemic ravages the rest of the country is sure to be a stressor for some players.
Families are not allowed to enter the Orlando bubble until the second round of the playoffs, slated to begin Aug. 30.
Many players were involved in the national Black Lives Matters protests that sprang up after George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis in May.
Being cut off from direct activism could be a negative drag on mental health as well.
All of that is sure to have an effect inside the NBA’s bubble.
“We’ve never been here before,” said DeRozan, who participated in the social injustice protests in his native Los Angeles. “We don’t know what it’s going to bring. I never thought I’d be playing in the NBA where you’d be playing one night, and the next night every sport is canceled. I have no clue (what’s going to happen).”
The NBA has promised to provide mental health professionals on-call to teams, from the time they begin arriving in Central Florida on July 7 to the projected end of the Finals in midOctober.
The league also has committed to providing a range of entertainment options — from golf and fishing to video games and movies — to help players occupy themselves during downtime.
The NBPA meanwhile, plans to dispatch Keyon Dooling — a former player who has become the union’s mental health counselor — to Florida for the rest of the season.
“There’s no doubt there’s tremendous sacrifice that everyone is making who’s going to be part of this campus in order to restart the league, so we’re going to have to keep a close eye on these issues,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said. “There will be people down there whose job it is to talk to players, both collectively and individually.”
It is only a small stretch to say mental health might not have been such a high priority in the NBA’s restart plan had it not been for DeRozan.
His candid revelation in February 2018 — while still with the Toronto Raptors — about his battles with depression opened the doors for other NBA players to broach the topic.
“I think we’re so fortunate in our league to have two guys, in Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan, who really gave us all more of a comfort level in speaking about this,” Paul said. “Mental health is real, and being in this situation we’re going to be trying to come up with any ideas that anyone has to try and make sure guys are healthy in that aspect of their life.”
For players not quite as used to the homebody life as Poeltl, part of the trick will be finding ways to avoid going stir crazy.
Many players likely will spend the downtime playing video games. DeRozan isn’t one of them.
“I haven’t played video games since I was 16,” he said.
DeRozan said he might hit one of the golf courses made available to players on the Disney campus.
He also plans to spend most of his nonbasketball time in Orlando with his nose in a book.
“For me, it’s trying to find a way to educate myself,” DeRozan said. “Whether it’s me picking five new books, finding something new to study, put yourself through a side-hustle school of self-education to kind of keep you busy. Just trying to see what I can do to help with the real-life things that’s going on in the world.”
For DeRozan, that seems to be the key to mental health as the NBA resumes under stressful circumstances.
Just because he will be physically living in a bubble doesn’t mean he has to stay there in his mind.