SI

This Twitter Account Is the Best Way to Follow Life Inside the NBA Bubble

In Monday’s Hot Clicks: the Twitter account that exhaustively documents NBA players’ Disney experience, a NASCAR fight and more.

Dan Gartland

It’s really like basketball camp

The most interesting part of the NBA restart was never going to be the games. The playoffs happen every year, but they never happen under such dire circumstances. Locking down most of the league inside a half-abandoned amusement park at the center of an outbreak of a deadly disease sounds like the rejected plot of a movie. But it’s real life in 2020.

Luckily for fans, nobody in sports is as active on social media as NBA players. They’ve all arrived at Disney and have been posting on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube about their experiences. You get to see what the food is like, how the courts are set up and, perhaps most interestingly, how they’re spending their free time. 

With so many players posting so much, it’s a lot to keep track of, which is why it’s great that there’s a Twitter account dedicated just to rounding up what players are up to.

@NBABubbleLife has already racked up more than 61,000 followers by exhaustively documenting how the experiment is going. There must be a bunch of people responsible for running the account, because there are so many players to keep track of, posting on so many different platforms. It’s a massive undertaking, but it’s a great public service. Instead of having to follow all these players on all those platforms, @NBABubbleLife puts it all in one place. 

Players are giving a look inside their hotel rooms, which already seem to be pretty sweet, even before they add their personal touches. 

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Some players are showing what the coronavirus testing procedure is like. 

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Disney also had to create a massive laundromat so that guys can all wash their clothes. 

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But definitely the most interesting part is seeing how players are occupying their time. It seems like the only things to do are play golf and go fishing. 

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The thing that becomes clear from following the goings-on in the bubble is that this is basically like a sleep-away basketball camp for millionaires. You wake up, eat some premade breakfast, go to practice and then hang out with your friends. Players seem to be enjoying themselves enough so far. We’ll see how long it stays like that. 

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Wasn’t he 62 when he retired?

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Email dan.gartland@si.com with any feedback or follow me on Twitter for approximately one half-decent baseball joke per week. Bookmark this page to see previous editions of Hot Clicks and find the newest edition every day. By popular request I’ve made a Spotify playlist of the music featured here. Visit our Extra Mustard page throughout each day for more offbeat sports stories.

Published
Dan Gartland
DAN GARTLAND

Dan Gartland is the writer and editor of Sports Illustrated’s flagship daily newsletter, SI:AM, covering everything an educated sports fan needs to know. He joined the SI staff in 2014, having previously been published on Deadspin and Slate. Gartland, a graduate of Fordham University, is a former Sports Jeopardy! champion (Season 1, Episode 5).

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