LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The Lakers wear their loved ones draped around their necks.
For LeBron James, it’s a gold chain that has links with his children’s names: Bronny, Bryce and Zhuri. For JaVale McGee, it’s a beaded necklace with a princess dangling from it, which jostles the other hardware McGee puts on after practice.
“My daughter made this necklace for me,” he said. “So right now it’s my favorite one.”
While players and coaches have access to golf, fishing, pool time and games in the NBA bubble, they don’t have access to their loved ones – one of the biggest challenges anyone with a family faces in a campaign at Disney World that could last several months.
The gaps have been filled by technology: More than one Laker has said they’re fortunate to live in an age where loved ones can not only heard but seen across vast distances. James personally thanked Steve Jobs and “the team at Apple” for creating FaceTime, which he uses to reach out to his three children and his wife, Savannah.
James has been away from his family for about a month before when he played for Team USA in the Olympics. But even that prior experience and the daily communication over video don’t entirely salve the pang of their absence.
“You can’t replicate actual presence when you’re waking up and you’re in the living room or you’re in the kitchen or you’re outside playing with your kids or playing with your daughter, playing video games with your boys or working out with your boys,” James said. “You can’t replicate that, I’m not there. But Savannah is a beast at what she does, that’s controlling the home and being that rock for our family. So I’m not worried about that.”
Many of the Lakers players have younger children who haven’t fully grasped the significance of their fathers’ extended departures. While he wears the necklace she made in his media interviews, McGee says his three-year-old daughter, Genevieve, still doesn’t quite understand why a host of reporters want to talk to her father on video.
Others, like Lakers coach Frank Vogel, have adolescent children. The Vogels have sculpted a routine of nightly chats that might have to adapt as games return. He’s missed his wife and daughters as an escape from the trappings of work. And unlike players’ families, it’s so far unclear that coaches’ families will be able to join tthem at Disney one round through the playoffs. In an attempt to limit the number of people in the bubble, several coaches around the league believe they won’t have that opportunity to reconnect in person until the playoffs are complete.
“The biggest thing that’s different for me right now is you don’t go home to your family,” Vogel said. “You go to your hotel room and look at a screen to be with your family.”
The disconnect changes some aspects of the typical playoff run: For James, he says he won’t do his typical social media blackout headed into the postseason.
“I can’t afford to,” he said. “I have to continue to check in with my family every single day. Check in with my mom, making sure everything is still going well, especially in the uncertainty of what 2020 has brought to all of us, so I can’t afford to do that just lose direct contact with everybody. I’ll be as locked in as I can be under the circumstances. I won’t cheat my teammates, I won’t cheat our fans and I won’t cheat myself. I’ll be ready to go.”
LeBron staying connected to Breonna Taylor case
Lakers players continued to put their weight behind the hope that charges will be brought against Louisville police officers on Tuesday morning. James and McGee spoke of their desire for accountability for the March shooting death of the 26-year-old EMT.
It’s a cause James spoke about Thursday night following the Lakers’ first scrimmage and has continued to resound throughout NBA circles. James said he’s been in contact with people in Louisville, including friends and family, whom he described as “irate,” “angry,” “sad,” and “disgusted” that the Kentucky attorney general has not filed charges and only one of the officers had been fired.
“I can only go off the facts of what happened, and I kinda put myself in that household, with them, coming into the house, a place where they shouldn’t have been in the first place, and then open firing and killing an innocent woman who had a bright future,” he said. “So I think about if it was a sister of mine. If it was my mother. If it was an auntie of mine. If it was a friend of mine. And then you think about the landscape of what we’re in right now where police brutality is going on.”
James’ riffs on social justice and racial equity form just one part of a push in the NBA restart to bring visibility to those causes. Several outlets have reported that players plan to kneel Thursday night for the national anthem, reflecting a symbol of protest made famous by quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
James has been also active in organizing, mobilizing a voting rights group called More Than a Vote and raising money for potential voters in Florida. His good friend and NBPA president Chris Paul said Sunday that Michelle Obama addressed players in the NBA and WNBA about the importance of voting.
McGee said the team has been discussing the Taylor case among themselves as well as talking to the media. The NBA restart platform has emboldened many players to put their social justice causes in the limelight.
“We’re trying to use that to really push the message forward about justice for our people,” he said.
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Lakers try to connect with familes from the NBA bubble - OCRegister
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