J.R. Smith Didn’t Pack Enough Underwear for the NBA Bubble
We’ve all been there
If you were going to be away from home for up to three months, how many pairs of underwear would you pack? Probably a lot, right? Well, not J.R. Smith.
Smith, who hasn’t played in the NBA since November 2018, joined up with the Lakers for their playoff push and spoke with Spectrum Sportsnet about life in the bubble. He said he likes that he can play golf every day and the food has gotten better since the initial quarantine period. There’s just one problem.
Asked what he wished he had packed, Smith replied, “Man, more underwear and socks.”
“Honestly, I packed like seven because I thought I’d be good for once a day,” Smith said. “But I ain’t calculate all the showers in between everything that I be doing, so I’ve been running through in like two, three days. We’ve got a great laundry system, though. We’ve got a great laundry system, so I’m good.”
Miscalculating the underwear situation is a classic packing mistake. Smith is lucky that the laundry setup is sufficient enough to keep him in clean drawers all week.
His praise for the laundry system sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. When I first saw the massive laundry room Disney constructed specifically for the NBA, I had visions of players doing their own laundry. I thought Russell Westbrook would have to ask Chris Paul if he was done using that dryer. That’s not the case, though.
Laundry actually sounds like a total pain in the ass. It falls to the team’s equipment managers, who have to take a bus to where that laundry room was set up.
After practices or games, equipment managers will have to load up the sweaty gear, take it back to the hotel, then call a shuttle to pick them up and take them to the laundry facility built for the restart — 66 washers and 66 dryers, all lined up inside what once was a batting cage at the Atlanta Braves' former spring training complex.
Maybe J.R. should order a few pairs of underwear off of Amazon to make life a little easier for the Lakers’ gear guy.
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