Good morning,

And welcome to the No Dunks podcast on the Athletic Network.

It's Wednesday, July 22nd.

I'm Jay E. Skeets and back from his great fishing expedition. It's the bearded

one, T. Hey, oh, hey, oh. Welcome back, T.K. We also have the international man of mystery taking

it to the Max. Lee Ellis. Friends. Got the man making the magic happen, JD. Hello. There he is.

And finally, a very special guest today.

He hosts two of my favorite NBA podcasts, both Open Floor and the Greatest of All Talk.

He's a writer from The Washington Post.

And, well, he's officially the first person we've had on the show who's actually coming to us live from inside the NBA bubble.

It's Ben Gulliver.

Ben, what's up, man?

Not too much, guys.

It's great to hear your voice in general.

Great to hear your voice because I didn't have a lot of human contact for the last week, locked up in my hotel room.

And I got to say, you must have teased this appearance because I spent all morning waiting through emails from your listeners saying, oh my God, it's like Voltron, it's like Wu-Tang Clan. You guys are like coming together here on the show. So I'm excited to be here. You know the last time we did this was during the lockout. You guys remember that in Portland, Oregon? Wow, yeah, great memory. That's exactly right. Yeah, Dwight James is going to be joining us in not too long. It's coming up in a half hour from now. Yeah, so how are you holding up? I mean, what have you been there now in Orlando? 10 days, something like that? Yeah, I'll say it's been a real roller coaster of the emotions. The first couple of days you're just in shock trying to get your bearings. Then you're getting a little bored and stir crazy in the hotel room. But they let us out on Sunday and it was the sweetest feeling. I'm like walking around the campus, my eyes are adjusting to the light and here's Donovan Mitchell being like, welcome to the bubble. It's like this feels like a movie. Like what's happening right now? You know, we start getting into some of these practice sessions. And the guys are just happy to be back playing basketball. I'll be honest. I'm feeling really excited and energetic about being able to just work again. I don't know how you guys felt. Like when the season shut down, I was just like getting a little bit boopy, you know, getting a little bit down in the dumps. Are we going to be without hoops for 18 months? And then the bubble idea, it almost sounded too good to be true. And now they're actually pulling it off. It seems like the testing protocol is working. Guys are staying healthy. And we're just seeing these guys in the gym. So getting here, LeBron, you know, talk about how much he missed his mom during quarantine the other day

or watching Janus just bang these threes, one after another last night at practice.

It doesn't feel normal, but it feels great to just kind of be back on the grind.

Yeah, you were, you had to do, like all reporters that are down there, the seven-day hotel room,

you know, lockdown. You were in quarantine for a week and you're now free. Though,

it sounds like you don't have that much area for you to roam. Is that right? Well, that's right. Well,

first of all, during the seven-day quarantine where we're getting tested every day, the only time I got to go outside of my room for any reason was to get the food or to get tested. So they're coming here with these, you know, these Q-tips to jab down my throat and to put up my nose. And the whole time I'm thinking like, guys, don't rush this. Like, this is the only fresh air I get. Like, if you want to choke me out, if you want to choke me out for like 20 minutes, fine. Like, that's great, you know, just keep picking my nose. But yeah, the pen, I'm calling it kind of a pen. I mean, it feels like we're in the bullpen of a baseball stadium, right? It's about 0.2 miles long from end to end. So it's not even a full lap around like a high school track.

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