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When we heard that Devin Booker, Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday were leaving for Tokyo and the Olympics after the NBA Finals, we assumed they’d be leaving pretty quickly.
As it turns out, they only arrived in Tokyo Saturday so hopefully they had lots of potassium on the flight.
On the other hand, these guys spend an incredible amount of time in the air. Next time you worry about flying, think about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He played for 20 years. Let’s assume he had 90 games a year, including playoffs, and that 45 of those were on the road. That’s a minimum of 1,800 flights during his career and that’s only games. He probably had quite a few other flights for business or personal reasons.
So it’s not like they’re not used to it and, as much as anyone, they know how to train their bodies to compensate for jet lag.
Still, it’s asking a lot and Draymond Green, for one, appreciates them doing it: “I have a lot of respect for those guys for not only committing to do this but actually keeping their word. You’re talking about three true professionals, three extremely competitive guys that wouldn’t be on their way here if this didn’t mean something...It’s on us to make sure that we do our parts to make sure they’re rewarded with what they ultimately came here for, which is to help us to compete and win a gold medal.”
Team USA opens with France Sunday morning (8:00 EST/Peacock) and in an interesting and unfortunate twist for Les Bleus, much of their support staff is in quarantine. The news is in that link but it’s way down the page.
No players are directly affected, or at least aren’t in quarantine, but what does that do to them? It’s unanswerable.
Regardless, we still except a tough game from Rudy Gobert and company.