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Scottie Pippen Says He Doesn’t Consider The Bubble Games To Be NBA Basketball, But Pickup 

Most people, myself included, consider the NBA Bubble to be a huge success. 

The fans are obviously missing, but the intensity and level of play have not lacked one bit. If, at all, the level of play has increased ever since the NBA has restarted, and it has been one of the most fun to watch playoffs in quite some time (maybe because we finally have had different contenders to previous years from the get go).

In an interview with Business Insider, Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen now said that while the games indeed have been entertaining, he doesn’t consider them to be NBA basketball, rather than pickup basketball, and he might even have a point:

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.