The three-time NBA champion, Danny Green, recently sat down with Bleacher Report and spoke about his time on the Lakers and how the 2020 championship run during the COVID-19 pandemic was undoubtedly the toughest ring to win for him.
“Most championships are super, surreal. This one was different because of the Bubble. The relief of ‘we can get out of here and go home,’ was all so worth it.”
“This was number three for me. I’ve been lucky, super lucky. I’ve been spoiled to the point that I’ve been able to experience it more than once,” Green said initially before diving into his experience in the Bubble.
“The weirdest part is that the rest of the resort does not like you… They are all leaving, and it’s just an empty place. And I guess in perspective, like I had thought about it in retrospect after the fact, like you have to go through all those days, and Miami is probably sick to lose.”
“Like, if you have to go through all those days and lose and then be there and watch a team at a restaurant like 30 ft away, celebrate, it’s kind of awkward,” Green said.
“It was by far the hardest championship that I had to achieve. It was making that adjustment playing through, having your family and friends not really there, not being able to even celebrate it properly.”
“We went to the same restaurant that we go to every day and celebrated as a team. But after that, no real parade. So, it was just different. But, you know, in the bubble, like a lot of different things going on, where the balls just start closing in on you mentally and emotionally.”
“It was a hard fall. And again, the physical task of playing every other day, which wears you down. It was by far the hardest, because again mentally taxing,” Green further added.
“I think people understand most of it, but I think there’s a lot that went into play for us to be there, get there, and win. And I think most fans do, the real fans appreciate it. That was an iconic, legendary team. And I think we would have won regardless of whether it was a bubble or not,” the three-time champion concluded.
During the championship run, Danny Green averaged 8.0 points, 3.3 rebounds, and 1.3 assists while shooting 39.8% from the field and 36.0% from beyond the arc in the 89 games he played through the 2020 championship run (68 regular season games and 21 postseason games).
Green is not the first former Lakers player to address the Bubble championship run. Alex Caruso faced a lot of criticism for seemingly taking a shot at the Lakers’ Bubble championship run when he won a ring last year with the Thunder.
Even more recently, Anthony Davis also said that he wants to win another championship simply because the Bubble experience did not feel ‘real’ to him in the sense of being able to celebrate adequately for becoming a world champion.
None of the players, in fact, discounted the value of the championship ring, but admitted that it put them in a position to want another one. With Green, the case was slightly different since he was near the end of his career when he won the 2020 championship ring.
So for him, the struggle represented a solid closure of his career, and the last time he was able to win an NBA championship, just four years before his retirement (he spent two of those four years mostly on the bench).
A lot of critics often discount the 2020 NBA championship run for the Lakers because they did not face a hostile crowd in the Finals. However, only the players who faced the grueling life that NBA players had inside the Bubble can comment on whether the circumstances had the same pressure or not.
It is evident from Green’s comments that it was a lot tougher than what people think it to be.
