G League finals: Balancing NBA minutes, middle-seat misery and roadside meals (2024)

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 beating the Stockton Kings, they bussed miles back to San Francisco and flew to cross country Boston for the Finals.

“Some players were in middle coach seats for the whole San Francisco to Boston flight,” Condit said. “We tried to get people to move from the aisle, but it’s a long flight. Then, everyone’s starving after taking a cross-country flight, so we stopped in New Hampshire to eat Chipotle on the side of the road.”

They would play a game, get a few hours of sleep, and then that 4:30 a.m. call time meant it was time to start moving everyone on to the next stop.

“We spent like 50 hours flying that week between the second round and Game 1 of the Finals,” Condit said. “It was definitely the most challenging part I’ve had traveling in my career with the Blue.”

Lindy Waters was fortunate to miss those 50 hours. He was up in the NBA, finally getting regular minutes. He averaged 9.8 points per game in the final two weeks of the season for the Thunder after spending most of the season with the Blue. But when the Blue lost Game 1 to Maine and went back to OKC, they brought him back to try to lead a comeback. That meant joining the exhausting four-game, five-night gauntlet.

“I try not to let my mind sit in there, because you can start to feel sorry for yourself and start thinking about all the negative things,” Waters said. “I just wake up with the mindset of just taking care of whatever’s in front of me.”

As Game 3 began Monday, the Celtics looked to be in control. Davison ran the offense well, finding rookie Jordan Walsh and recent Boston signee Neemias Queta to take the early lead.

But late in the second quarter, Maine hit a wall as OKC went on a 28-0 run. Queta, the lone Maine player to have a regular role with the NBA Celtics, was sick but cleared to play just 30 minutes before tip-off. He started well but was visibly lagging on defense as the night wore on. Walsh looked like he was in for a big night early before twisting his ankle in the first quarter and never being the same after that.

A few days earlier, Peterson was in Boston, burying open 3s. Then, he went 1-of-7 from deep in the deciding game as the Blue won the G League title with a 117-100 win.

Bringing home the hardware 🏆 pic.twitter.com/s9ziucqDST

— OKC BLUE (@okcblue) April 16, 2024

“They shot the piss out of it in Boston. They played great in Boston. They had a great rhythm,” Maine Celtics coach Blaine Mueller said postgame when asked why the players shuttling between Boston and Maine went cold. “To me, in my opinion, as a competitor, if you can’t find it for the deciding game in the Finals, then I don’t really have a whole lot for you.”

Mueller chalked it up to the anxiety of the moment, saying he didn’t feel it was them running out of gas. You can do all that preparation to keep your body fresh, but winning a title is about mental fortitude. Peterson got so many of the looks he was burying earlier in the series but found the rim just about every time.

Waters, who had 15 points and 11 rebounds, tore through Maine’s defense alongside Finals MVP Ousmane Dieng and hit big shots every time the Celtics chipped away at the massive lead.

“I’m amped right now,” Waters said. “It’s great, watching the guys win game by game throughout the playoffs, going through all that travel themselves. To be able to be here and bring that trophy home, you can’t take that for granted.”

Everyone wanted to win it. Most of them were on their last legs after a long and arduous season.

Maine lost its first-ever trip to the Finals, but the title isn’t all the G League is about. Mueller said the team’s three tenets were joy, development and winning. The latter didn’t go as planned, but they enjoyed the road to the end.

“I told the guys we didn’t need a championship to know how special a team this is, how special the locker room is,” Mueller said. “It would’ve been nice to have (won) so everybody else would know how special it is. But for me, this is the best year of my life. I had so much fun.”

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(Top photo of the OKC Blue: China Wong/NBAE via Getty Images)