NBA ‘home’ teams not seeing much advantage so far; Oladipo works out

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The Lakers and Bucks exited practice Wednesday to palm trees around them and sunny skies overhead.

The weather is good at Walt Disney World. The service is great. The setting seems ideal.

For the best NBA teams, it’s anything but.

The top four seeds in each conference should be playing in their arenas right now, with home-court advantage in the first two games of their playoff series. They’d have their fans screaming during the action and, in many cases, families waiting at home afterward.

Boy, do some of them miss that at the moment.

“If’s definitely a difference. You can feel it,” Bucks All-Star Khris Middleton said. “There’s times where we really depended on our crowd last year and during the season this year to kind of pull us out of our struggle or whatever it was. And here, there is none of that.

“We have to bring it every single night. We can’t rely on our crowd, our fans, to give us that energy. We have to bring it ourselves.”

Milwaukee and Los Angeles, the No. 1 seeds in each conference, both bring 1-0 deficits into their games Thursday. So do the fourth-seeded Indiana Pacers, another “home” team in name only who dropped their opener against Miami.

Everyone at the bubble points out that it’s the same for all of them. They’ve all been on this road trip for more than a month, all dealing with obstacles they never faced in another postseason.

But right now it’s more hurting the teams that should be playing in front of rowdy fans, not virtual ones. The celebrities along the sidelines at Staples Center are part of an atmosphere that can make the Lakers so tough to beat at home, and the passion for basketball in Indiana means the Pacers can always count on a big backing in their arena.

And maybe it would have helped after losing if players could have done the things they like at home, instead of spending much of their time in their rooms on campus. All that time alone may even make it harder to shake off a loss than in a normal situation.

“That’s case by case but personally, I don’t think so,” Lakers coach Frank Vogel said. “In the playoffs, guys feel the losses, they enjoy the wins and I don’t think it matters that much that we’re here than elsewhere. So I’m confident in how we’re going to respond.”

If they don’t — and neither the Lakers nor Bucks have played well enough at Disney to make it a sure thing they will — they’ll be halfway to joining the short list of No. 1 seeds to have dropped a seven-game series against a No. 8.

It hasn’t happened since 2012, when Philadelphia beat Chicago. That was at the end of another unusual season, shortened to 66 games because of a lockout.

This one, following the suspension because of the coronavirus, is even more challenging.

“Now that we’re in the playoffs, the focus has gone to playoff basketball, that mentality. So I think we’ve been able to adapt to it,” Pacers coach Nate McMillan said. “It’s certainly something we’ve never gone through and hope to not have to go through again, but we’re here like the other teams and I think everybody is making that adjustment.”

NOTES: Guard Victor Oladipo took part in the Pacers’ workout Wednesday after leaving in the first quarter of the opener when he was poked in the eye. The eye has responded well and he is hopeful of playing in Game 2.