Scottie Pippen Tears Into NBA ‘Pickup Basketball’ in the Bubble

The NBA bubble and its games are not your run of the mill basketball. For one, there’s no crowds.

From a TV viewers standpoint, the game being played doesn’t look too much different, but apparently the style of play is a lot different than your standard NBA Game. NBA Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen had some things to say about the quality of basketball, and how the games are nothing more than glorified pickup games.

Via Business Insider: 

“Well, I’m going to be honest. It’s not NBA basketball. It’s not the hard grind. It’s not the travel. It’s not the fans. It’s not the distractions. Really, to me, it’s pickup basketball. It’s going to the gym. Yeah, you already got your team. Y’all practicing together. But it’s a more of a pickup type of basketball game, because there’s no fans in the stands. So there is no distraction. There’s no real noise. There’s no pressure on the players, you know. Prime example: I looked at Rondo. Rondo ain’t made three pointers in his whole NBA career. Now, all of a sudden, he’s in a bubble, he’s probably a 50% three point shooter. I haven’t even checked the stats.

But that’s just something that I consider making the game so easy, because Rondo can’t score inside of an arena, when you got depth perception. Like, there’s a whole lot of things that make the NBA hard. The bubble makes the NBA easy to me. There’s no travel. That’s the killer itself. So you’re sleeping in the same bed every night. You’re walking to the gym. You’re not having to go with a 25 to 50 minute bus ride to an arena. You’re not having to probably even sit in the arena for two hours before the game, talk to the media, deal with all the outside stuff that they’re trying to pull you in to make some distraction and, you know, throw the team in a loop. So it’s a different game, but it’s very entertaining.”

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It’s definitely not the grind of a regular NBA schedule, but it’s still the best basketball players in the world. If it’s just like pickup basketball as Scottie suggested, the best team is still going to come out on top.

At this point during a pandemic, I’m pretty sure NBA fans would watch just about any kind of basketball.

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