PORTLAND, Maine — Life in the G League can be chaotic. Direct flights are a luxury. Crossing state lines to find a way to the next city is just part of the job, but this moment was different.
As the NBA regular season was wrapping up, the best-of-three G League Fnals were heading to the winner-take-all showdown in Maine between the G League Celtics and the Oklahoma City Blue. The top two seeds in the NBA were battling it out in the minor league.
In the final days of the NBA regular season, the bench guys finally get to shine. For Celtics two-way player Drew Peterson, this was his big chance to get real NBA minutes for the first time in his career.
The problem? He had a championship to win more than a thousand miles away. Peterson was one of several players in the G League Finals pulling double duty, playing as many as four games in five nights.
To pull it off, Peterson played in Game 2 against OKC on Thursday evening, left his hotel at 3:45 a.m. to catch a flight to Atlanta and then Boston. He got in a quick nap, then went to TD Garden, where he dropped eight points in the Celtics’ win over the Charlotte Hornets. It wasn’t an important game for the Celtics, but it was his first chance to play extended minutes in the NBA.
“It’s my first few opportunities up here, and, even coming off not much sleep, you got to be ready to go,” Peterson told The Athletic before his first game back with Boston since his two-minute debut in December. “Especially as a guy who is trying to earn your way in and you’re playing sparing minutes, you got to be ready to go right when you’re in there.”
There was some irony for Peterson. Boston had clinched the top seed weeks ago, so Game No. 81 meant little to many people watching. But, for Peterson, this might have been his best chance to prove he is an NBA player despite also playing for a G League championship. He had to navigate both.
“That’s really the spirit of what the G League is, where you have guys moving between the leagues,” G League commissioner Shareef Abdur-Rahim said. “On any given night, you can be in a G League game and the next night play in an NBA game. That’s illuminated at this time, with how concentrated our playoffs are.”
These sleepless journeys are the reward for a call-up from the G League.
“This is our job, man. Expect nothing less and you’re always one call away from moving up or going back down to wherever they at,” Celtics two-way guard JD Davison told The Athletic. “We wanted to play them last few games in (Boston) anyway to give our guys a break, so we’re not complaining.”
Just getting these G League teams from city to city is a challenge. There’s no charter plane on the runway for them. Maine’s manager of basketball operations, Louis Copolov, spent the playoffs mapping out every possibility to get his team to the next stop. They usually fly commercial, with 7-footers hoping not to get stuck in middle seats.
The G League postseason is single elimination up until the best-of-three Finals, so Copolov had to work with the team’s travel agent to queue up multiple flights through various connections.
“You’re booking 27 flights 24 hours in advance. It’s pretty stressful. And you’re forecasting for different scenarios,” Copolov said. “You’re holding tickets to go to one destination and then to another. There’s a lot of stuff that’s up in the air. And the moment you know where it is you’re going, you just book it.”
Things were even more complicated for OKC on their route to the Finals. According to travel and logistics coordinator Chris Condit, the Blue’s path to the Finals included a bus from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Omaha, Nebraska, where they then split up into as many as four groups on some of their varying connections to eventually make it to Sacramento, California. After…
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