The New Orleans Pelicans recently returned from a grueling nine-day, five-game road trip that took them from the East Coast to the West Coast with plenty of stops – and time zone changes - in between. Pelicans.com was given an all-access pass to show how an NBA team handles the rigors of such a difficult road trip.
It wasn’t that long ago that the average business traveler had a good chance of periodically spotting entire NBA teams in airport terminals, a difficult-to-miss group of athletes who trudged through security checks and boarded commercial planes just like everyone else. That changed permanently in the early- to mid-1990s, when it became universal to either use your own plane (it’s how the Dallas Mavericks travel, for example) or a charter service.
Fast forward to this sunny March day at the private-charter area of Armstrong International Airport. A combined total of 45 Pelicans players, coaches and staff members – along with their vehicles – go through a separate security check, before boarding a 90-minute flight to Charlotte. The team uses Delta’s charter service for all of its flights en route to 41 road games per season, with a rotating crew of pilots and attendants who become familiar faces.
New Orleans equipment manager David Jovanovic has witnessed most of the NBA’s gradual changes in travel, beginning his career with the expansion Charlotte Hornets in 1988. Twenty-eight years later, the logistics of playing the 82-game NBA schedule are nearly unrecognizable in comparison to when Jovanovic was a first-year employee just out of college.
“Back then, when we did commercial flights, you couldn’t travel with as much equipment, for example,” Jovanovic said. “You had to take the bare minimum, because you had to be able to get it on the plane and there were (essential) things you couldn’t afford to not have on it (such as uniforms and game sneakers). You were like any other passenger.”
It may not occur to the average contemporary NBA player or employee, but prior to private flights, there was no such thing as leaving a city immediately after a game, because commercial flights that depart later than 10 p.m. are nearly nonexistent. Instead, teams had to wait until the morning to head to the next city, even if they had to play a back-to-back game later that same day. That meant players might get a maximum of three or four hours of sleep before their alarm woke them.
“Usually you took the first flight in the morning, often at 6 a.m.,” Jovanovic said. “So you’d wake up at 4 and go.”
Although charter flights have made travel more convenient and easier for everyone sleep-wise, some daunting aspects of an 82-game schedule are unavoidable. Over the seven-month period from October preseason through April, there are still countless extremely late nights where bedtime doesn’t come until just before the sun rises. For people like Jovanovic with families – he is married with two daughters – life still goes on back home without them. It’s a job he loves, but one that comes with obvious sacrifices.
“The toughest part (in terms of the wear of travel) is the late nights,” he said. “People don’t understand how late it can be. They think you get in at 1 or 2, but sometimes it’s 4:30. And then you still have to get up the next day – I never get to sleep in.
“I’ve missed all of the daddy-daughter dances (during the school year) and other things, but this job always came first. My wife understood, my kids understood. But it’s a hard thing. I’ve missed Christmases.”
Like many people who work in the NBA, Jovanovic has followed reports in recent years about potential changes to the schedule that should mean fresher, better-rested players at tip-off. Having experienced 28 years of travel and more than 2,000 regular season games, he is intrigued by the proposal to stretch the 82-game schedule by a couple of weeks, meaning more time between games and fewer back-to-back game nights. He’s curious to find out the potential impact.
“The thing is, they need to lengthen the season by a week here or a week there,” he said. “But we’ve always played back-to-backs. I understand that we want to get the stars rest, but we’ve always done it this way. Is it going to be better? I don’t know. We’ll see. In theory it should be.”
Pelicans players looking for advice on how to withstand the rigors and travel of the 82-game schedule could do a lot worse than to simply pay a visit to the team’s fourth-year TV analyst. Over a four-year span in the middle of former NBA guard David Wesley’s 14-year career, he missed a total of just one game, including playing all 50 contests during the rapid-fire 1998-99 campaign. A lockout that season meant wedging 50 games into a three-month span, leading to multiple three-games-in-three-days sets. These days, some NBA teams – most notably San Antonio – have begun planning and scheduling midseason DNPs to rest key players, which was completely unheard of during Wesley’s career (1993-2007).
The undrafted 6-foot-1 player says the circumstances surrounding how he got a foot in the door in the NBA affected him greatly.
“I came into this league trying to make it, playing behind guys and those guys got hurt,” said Wesley, who played one prior season in the CBA. “That’s how I basically started getting my toes wet, then finally ended up in the starting lineup and made a career out of it. So my thing was, always come to work, always be available. That way they had to take your job; you’re not just giving it up because you missed a month out of the season. So if I could play – maybe my back hurt, maybe I was limping – I found a way to get out there. But a lot of it is luck. You see how easy it is to get hurt in this league.”
When the Pelicans arrived at their Charlotte hotel on Tuesday, a familiar scene played out for Wesley at the Ritz-Carlton, with numerous fans stationed near the front door, seeking an autograph from the former Charlotte Hornet (he played there 1997-2002 and is permanently recognized in a display of past Charlotte Hornets greats inside Time Warner Cable Arena).
When the Pelicans arrive in virtually any city, at any time of day – even if it’s minus-15 degrees at 3 a.m. on a weekday in January in Minneapolis – there are invariably a group of autograph-seekers waiting at the team hotel. Many bring photos or other Anthony Davis items for the three-time All-Star to sign, but many also want a signature from any member of the team, including its TV analyst. Wesley is sometimes taken aback by the requests, particularly when they come from someone who can’t possibly be old enough to recall watching him play.
“Some of it is surprising,” Wesley said. “Some of the younger kids I see I’m thinking, ‘Were you even old enough to remember my career?’ But it’s fun. It’s a nice gesture and even cool for people to just say what’s up.” He pauses, then adds self-deprecatingly with a smile, “The thing is, I don’t know what they could possibly do with my autograph at this point.”
Fans in certain road cities are known for having extensive knowledge of the NBA, in particular Northeastern hubs with tradition-rich franchises such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia. For example, even though he last played for the Celtics two decades ago (1994-97), he is regularly recognized in Beantown.
“Here (in Charlotte) is good, but my best city is always Boston,” Wesley said. “They are true, true fans. If I’m walking down the street, I get more recognition there than anywhere, and I was only there for three years. They appreciate the hard work and my style of play. They are knowledgeable fans who are really into their sport and their teams.”
That’s not necessarily always the case on the road, though. Fans occasionally will yell to Wesley “Hey, David West!” getting his name confused with a similarly named former New Orleans starter, who actually was a NOLA Hornets teammate of Wesley’s for two seasons.
“Somebody once handed me a David West basketball card at a road game to sign,” Wesley recalls, laughing at the memory. “I was like, ‘This isn’t even me!’ (The fan) was like, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not me.’”
Between the hectic practice and game schedule of the regular season, there are fewer opportunities than you might think for NBA players and coaches to do sightseeing or visit historic places during road trips. But on a rainy afternoon, not far from the team hotel adjacent to Beale Street, the Pelicans went on a guided tour of the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is built on the site of the old Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination occurred in 1968. It details the events and important figures of the centuries-long struggle for racial equality in America.
There are a few places in the NBA where teams believe it’s important for their players to visit at least once, including the solemn memorial site of the Oklahoma City bombing, which is just blocks from where most teams stay in OKC. The Civil Rights Museum is another such place.
“Visiting the Civil Rights Museum more than anything is educational,” Pelicans Coach Alvin Gentry said. “I think it’s something where we have so many young guys on our team, so I don’t know if they’re really familiar with everything that’s gone on in the Civil Rights Movement. I just thought it was a great place to take the team and have guys from all races see the struggle and everything that went on.”
Before and after the impactful museum visit, the Pelicans spent a chunk of their time preparing for the Grizzlies, the opponent in Friday’s game. Like every NBA team, New Orleans divvies up scouting responsibilities for the other 29 opponents among its assistant coaches, with Fred Vinson in charge of the Grizzlies. A former NBA guard and a six-year member of the New Orleans coaching staff, Vinson has the advantage of possessing extensive knowledge of the personnel and tendencies of Southwest Division opponents (other opponent scouting assignments are sometimes based on background experience, which is why former OKC assistant coach Robert Pack preps the Pelicans for the Thunder).
The process of getting ready for the Grizzlies actually starts days and weeks earlier, with Pelicans advance scouts who chart Memphis games in person. Like every advance scout, they log and diagram play calls while seated close enough to hear head coaches’ instructions. They also monitor a wide range of other aspects of games and personnel from both teams involved, partly for future potential usage in the trade or free-agency market. As it pertains to this matchup against Memphis, the advance scouts are an invaluable tool for Vinson, who relies on them to help pinpoint Grizzlies tendencies. Memphis does present one unique challenge in the March 11 meeting that is out of New Orleans’ control: due to a wide range of key injuries, the Grizzlies’ starting lineup and rotation are in major flux, also partly a result of recent trades at the February deadline. That’s one reason why NBA teams only watch the most recent batch of games that an upcoming opponent has played.
“You don’t watch a game that is too (old), such as 10 games ago, because there are personnel changes that come via a trade, injuries, style of play, a coaching change,” Vinson said. “All of that changes the whole dynamic of the information (advance scouts) give us.
“There are a lot of unknown variables (with an unpredictable opponent like Memphis) that affect you. You don’t know who’s going to start. You don’t know how they’ll try to attack you without their key guys. You have to prepare for a lot.”
No matter how much time teams may spend focusing on a total of 29 opponents over the course of a season, it’s dangerous to make too many changes based on the other team. Consistent teams generally rely on the same strengths in order to win games.
“You always want to stick to your principles, such as how you defend pick-and-roll or defend the post,” Vinson said. “You can’t figure everything out that an opposing team does, so you can’t walk guys through every play. There are things that happen on the court that you have to react to, so it’s important you rely on what you always do as a team defensively.”
There’s a multi-person “team” that makes sure the Pelicans reach their travel destinations all season, but remain entirely in the background. They are the pilots, flight attendants and staff members of Delta, the airline that has operated the basketball franchise’s charter service in recent years. How “behind the scenes” are they? During an informal conversation with a Delta staff member on the 90-minute trek from Memphis to Milwaukee, he noted that in his 40-plus years working in the airline industry, Pelicans.com’s curiosity was the first time any media has ever asked him about how charter-flight service actually works.
If you think NBA teams have busy schedules, take a look at what the average week is like for a charter service. Delta actually has contracts with teams in a wide range of sports – both on the professional and college levels – in basketball, hockey, baseball, football and various others. That requires some adept scheduling – for example, during one recent four-day span, including a Pelicans flight, the same crew transported four teams from four different sports to four different cities.
“March Madness” is the popular nickname for the NCAA’s annual 68-team men’s basketball tournament, but each spring, charter services also experience their own version of madness. With charters ferrying college hoops teams all over the country during the first weekend of the tournament, on only a few days’ notice, services such as Delta’s are required to map out a dizzying number of potential scenarios based on the scheduling and outcome of matchups. For example, Delta once provided service to all eight teams at the same first-round NCAA site, meaning they had to navigate transporting four losing teams immediately back to campus after defeats, while waiting until two days later to ferry the Round 1 winners to their next stop.
In the NBA (and NHL for that matter), April and May are particularly complicated, with a varying number of “Delta teams” participating in the playoffs from year to year, but with no definitive end date for their seasons to conclude. While all this is going on, keep in mind that Delta and other charter services are also traveling with – for example – Major League Baseball teams in the early stages of their 162-game seasons, as well as college teams in a variety of spring sports.
Think your job can be aggravatingly inconvenient because it requires too much flexibility from you in scheduling days or hours? During multiple weekends in March, some charter services and their employees will travel to an NCAA location, not knowing whether they’ll need to be there for one day, or as many as four.
The competition between NBA teams on the court can often be heated and intense, particularly when it’s two clubs with a past history of playoff grudge matches (see Clippers-Grizzlies). But away from the on-floor action, cooperation among NBA franchises is sometimes paramount.
After an overtime loss in Memphis late Friday night, the Pelicans had minimal time to prepare for Saturday’s game at Milwaukee. Despite landing in Wisconsin at 1 a.m. and finally falling asleep around 3, New Orleans 16-year equipment manager Kory Johnson headed to BMO Harris Bradley Center at 8:30 to get ready for Bucks-Pelicans. In back-to-back situations such as this, the home team washes the visiting team’s uniforms and other gear in their arena, then hang-dries the items in the locker room, a huge assist.
“For back-to-backs, we do the same things we do for every game, but it’s all just on a shorter timeframe for everything to get done,” Johnson said.
As the Pelicans’ travel coordinator for the past four years, Johnson’s duties also consist of a wide range of logistical planning , including flights, hotels, buses, as well as scheduling of practices and shootarounds in other cities.
“It’s a lot,” Johnson said of the amount of advance planning that goes into a five-game road trip such as this one.
The regular season is hectic for travel coordinators, but the playoffs are often even more complex. In another example of cooperation between NBA teams, when the Pelicans and Thunder were vying for the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference last spring – and a first-round matchup vs. Golden State – they agreed that the winner would simply take over the other’s hotel reservations in San Francisco, if necessary. Both teams booked a multi-night stay for before and after the weekend of April 17-18, but as it turned out, only the Pelicans needed the rooms.
Guests staying at the nation’s premier hotels sometimes can be a bit taken aback when they hop on a treadmill and notice a few faces nearby they’ve probably only seen on TV.
“Wait, isn’t that Anthony Davis?”
When NBA teams travel, the options are often limited in terms of workout space on off days, such as this rainy, gloomy weekend afternoon that follows the Pelicans’ back-to-back games in Memphis and Milwaukee. Despite a four-hour, cross-country flight that included a two-hour time change and setting clocks ahead one hour for Daylight Savings Time (you do the math), New Orleans’ trainers are available in the St. Regis Hotel fitness center to handle players’ needs. Although it’s technically an off day for the team, there really are no off days for the staff.
“We try to have availability every single day,” the Pelicans’ Jared Lewis said. “Guys who aren’t playing (in games) have to come in (to work out), as well as anyone who needs something looked at or needs treatment comes in.
“We try to find times that allow everyone to get adequate sleep. If we get in to a city at 2 in the morning, then try to have treatments at 8, there may not be anyone who comes in. So we modify the schedule around what we’re doing, which is constantly changing. The logistics of it can be challenging, so sometimes we have to use the hotel gyms.”
Among the range of factors cited for why NBA teams almost always win more at home than on the road, consider how sleep patterns and daily routines are constantly thrown off by multi-game trips.
“We have a lot more equipment available at home, and advantages such as having the training room right next to the weight room (at the Metairie practice facility),” Lewis said. “We have a cryo chamber at home – obviously we can’t travel with that. We bring as much as we can, but space is an issue. Everyone’s schedule is just less consistent on the road.”
It’s a weeknight matchup against the history-chasing Golden State Warriors in Oracle Arena, a venue many players believe is the toughest in the NBA for visitors (see sidebar). For the Pelicans’ Alvin Gentry, it’s another return to where he won a championship in 2015, as lead assistant under Steve Kerr. Warriors coaches and players greet Gentry like the old friend he is whenever they see him in the building, but are not nearly as hospitable when the game starts, rolling to a 125-107 win over the Pelicans.
“It was a special relationship,” Gentry said of his time with the Warriors. “Obviously when you win a championship, you’re tied together for life. It was just a really unique situation.”
After a magical year with Golden State, Year 1 for the coach in New Orleans has been considerably tougher, starting in preseason, when injuries began to pile up. Asked what may be the most surprising aspect to the average fan of an NBA head coach’s role, Gentry cites one off-court aspect of his job.
“Probably the biggest thing is being an amateur psychologist,” Gentry said. “You’ve got to try to look at each guy and figure out what he needs mentally. If you think about it, Jrue Holiday’s needs are different from Ryan Anderson’s, whose are different from AD and Kendrick Perkins. All the guys are different. At any time, you have to have on 10 hats or 13 different hats. It’s also a lot tougher when you have aspirations to have a great season, and it’s kind of been decimated by injuries. So now guys have a tendency to struggle. You’ve got to try to pick those guys up. The team kind of follows your lead, so you’ve got to be up (energetic) as a head coach. You also have to make sure when you criticize, it’s a constructive thing.”
“Alvin is a great friend,” Kerr said, during a pregame press conference filled with the smiles and laughter you’d expect from a coach whose team is 59-6. “I feel for him – they’re having a tough year and have had so many injuries. But he’s been around this game for a long time and impacted a lot of teams, a lot of players. He was huge for us last year. His impact helped us win the championship and helped me kind of settle in to my new job. And he’s hilarious. He’s fun to be around.”
On Day 8 of the trip, the Pelicans experienced an extreme in-season NBA rarity, a bus ride taking them from one road city to another. There are few circumstances that arise during the regular season in which it’s significantly faster to travel by bus than by plane – or even feasible – but this was one such instance, with only 90 miles separating the Golden State Warriors from the Sacramento Kings.
The city-to-city bus travel is so rare that over the past three seasons, this was the first time New Orleans has done so. As it turns out, however, the Pelicans will go by bus again in April, when they play at Brooklyn on a Sunday afternoon, then visit Philadelphia for a Tuesday night game. Instead of navigating the lengthy process of heading to one of the New York City airports and waiting to take off, then making an ultra-brief flight from the Big Apple to the City of Brotherly Love, the Pelicans will save considerable time by simply busing the 95 miles.
That was also the logic behind an often-scenic bus trip on a pleasant Tuesday morning through a portion of Northern California, which ferried the Pelicans to the Kings’ practice facility in Sacramento. In another example of the busy nature of the NBA schedule, when the Pelicans arrived for their workout, the Sacramento coaches’ offices that surround two practice courts were completely empty – the Kings were in Los Angeles, getting ready to play the Lakers that night, before returning to host the Pelicans on Wednesday.
For Sacramento area native Ryan Anderson, the highlight of the team’s five-game, nine-day road trip undoubtedly comes on Day 9. The Pelicans’ visit to California’s capital city means a rare chance to spend quality time with people he doesn’t get to see often, something the proud uncle never takes for granted.
“It’s always great coming back home to Sacramento,” the forward said. “It’s a chance to spend a little time with family, stay at home, have a home-cooked meal. These are rare times through the season for me, especially being so far away. It’s sometimes a little bit of overwhelming, but it’s good to be at home.”
For New Orleans players Anderson, Quincy Pondexter and Jrue Holiday, the 6-8 games played per season in California are always something to look forward to, because that’s where many family members and friends reside. It’s a reassuring feeling that breaks up the long season and the distance players can feel while living somewhere else and traversing the country from October through the spring.
“That’s one of the aspects people don’t think much about,” Anderson said. “For us, it’s almost impossible (to see family at times). My dad has a job he can’t leave for. My mom is very busy as an interior designer. My sister has two baby boys; it’s hard to see them… People don’t put it into perspective. Yes, our jobs are great and this is a dream of life (to play in the NBA). But at the same time, it’s hard not seeing your family.”
After four straight often-frustrating defeats, the Pelicans and Anderson capped their season-long road trip with an enjoyable 123-108 win at Sacramento. Anderson pours in 29 points and five three-pointers, in the final game the former local high school hoops star will ever play in Sleep Train Arena, before the Kings move to the Golden 1 Center next fall.
Roughly 80 minutes after the buzzer, the Pelicans’ charter flight takes off from the Sacramento airport runway at 10:30 p.m. Pacific time, then touches down in Kenner roughly 3.5 hours later, but after factoring in a two-hour time change, it’s 4 a.m. Central when they land. The good news is, as players, coaches and staff step off the plane and head to their cars, it’s already a perfect 72 degrees in the New Orleans area. After being gone for more than a week and staying and playing in five other cities from coast to coast, everyone can agree, it’s good to be home.