After a light practice Tuesday afternoon at Emerson College in Boston, the majority of the Portland Trail Blazers got stuck in an elevator for roughly 30 minutes, an experiance that went viral after Meyers Leonard, Evan Turner and Enes Kanter all posted videos of the harrowing ordeal on social media. On Wednesday, the team returned to Emerson College for shootaround prior to their game versus the Boston Celtics at TD Garden (5 p.m. tipoff on NBC Sports NW and ESPN). Here's what Leonard, Damian Lillard and Turner had to say about the ordeal and their eventual escape...
MEYERS LEONARD
"Quite a few guys came in yesterday just to get some extra work in, play one-on-one, get some shots up, but as we were leaving -- typical of NBA guys, they're impatient, everybody wants to get on the elevator at once -- well when you've got like four seven-footers on one elevator and six other guys, you might run into some issues. So I don't know, after we closed the door we thought of course everything was going to be fine, but when we heard a big 'WHAM' and I was like, okay, that doesn't sound good.
"So we waited for a second and then we were like, we might actually be stuck. So we waited probably four to five minutes, we hit the little emergency button, nothing happened. So we hit the call button and they said 'Hello, this is the police' and we said 'Okay, we're stuck on an elevator, we need some help' because we weren't sure if our text messages were going through to the staff who that still in the gym. So he said 'Alright, just hang tight, we're going to figure out who needs to come over there and get it all figured out.'
"We ended up being on the elevator about 30 minutes. When they were trying to manually, essentially, move us we kept dropping real hard, so that was pretty interesting. It was pretty hot, quite a few guys were uncomfortable, but as a veteran, I kept my cool and made sure everybody was good on the elevator."
DAMIAN LILLARD
You looked like one of the more scared players on the elevator.
"That's just the part of the video that they showed. That's just the way it was edited. I was standing there like everybody else at first and then it was like, we gotta play tomorrow so I'm sitting down. And then it started getting hot and I was the smallest person in there, so I was like, we need to clear out some space for each other. There's a lot of breath moving around up here. So I sat down."
Were you scared? Nervous?
"I wasn't scared, I could have sat in there like an hour or two longer. I would have been fine, but I was just like, are we going to get out of here? I heard the people trying to get us up and the elevator kept like shaking and going up and then dropping and I was like 'I don't know if they gonna get us out of here any time soon. I'm hungry!' I don't want to eat nobody."
What about the granola bars?
"So, ET had two granola bars and he was like 'I'm keeping one for myself but y'all can split this one nine way or eight ways or whatever.' And he just sat it down and I wasn't listening to that part, so I thought he just didn't want it, so I broke it in half and I ate half of it. And they was like 'We all gotta survive off of this!' and I was like 'Well, y'all gonna have to survive off of this because I'm breaking out of here. After a while, I'm gonna figure out how to get out of here, so I gotta eat something for my escape energy.' That was my mentality."
Was Evan Turner helpful? Entertaining?
"I think he was helpful because it was entertainment the whole time so we didn't really have a moment where like we sat there and was like 'We stuck.' He was making fun the whole time."
EVAN TURNER
"The smallest dude on there was Damian and it was like 10 of us, so you can only imagine. Enes, Meyers, Skal, Zach, myself, it's some big dudes on there. The bad boy just stopped and luckily nobody freaked out, Rodney has a little panic attack, but it was smooth. The best way it could possibly end."
Was it claustrophobic?
"I don't know because in order not to freak out I didn't go to that mind, that tunnel of thinking about freaking out. I saw Rodney Hood freak out, I was about to freak out, so I was like, let's not even take it there, you know?"
You seemed to be comforting Gary Trent Jr.
"Yeah, I saw his family on Monday in Cleveland, they told me to take care of him. When I saw the elevator stop I just made sure I played the big brother role, consoled him, told him everything was going to be fine. That was it, that's what vets do."