Sixers

Daryl Morey Says Everyone in the NBA Thinks the Bubble Championship Should Come With an Asterisk

By Kyle Pagan

Published: Jul 31st, 2025 · 11:24 AM EDT

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Joe Vardon at The Athletic (with ads) did a mini-oral history on the NBA Bubble five years later and Sixers GM Daryl Morey, who was head of the Houston Rockets at the time, told Vardon that it isn’t just burners on Twitter who think the Lakers title deserves an asterisk:

Morey: Had the Rockets won the title, I absolutely would have celebrated it as legitimate, knowing the immense effort and resilience required. Yet, everyone I speak to around the league privately agrees that it doesn’t truly hold up as a genuine championship. Perhaps the lasting legacy of the NBA bubble is that the NBA should be proud of its leadership at both the beginning and end of the pandemic, even though the champion will forever be marked by an asterisk.

I know the first reaction from a lot of people is going to be that Morey should focus on winning a title himself before he has thoughts on someone else’s asterisk title, but nothing he said criticizes the Lakers. He thinks the resilience and effort in the bubble makes it a legitimate title. His experience is drawn off of what people around the league say. But if I was a Lakers fan what would I care about Morey’s or anyone else’s opinion on the bubble? The banner still hangs and they aren’t afraid to count it as one of their 17 titles. If the Sixers won it all that year we’d be socially distanced (wink wink) on Broad Street.

Vardon goes on to make a good point about the Bubble championship later in the story, referencing how typically air travel effects older players during a normal playoff series:

Vardon: Everyone played by the same rules, and the Lakers were a great team that year anyway. While I echo what my colleagues say about the difficulty of winning the bubble playoffs, I do have a “Yeah, but…” One of the hard parts of the postseason is the air travel — especially on older players because of their recovery times. LeBron took one flight in three months, and I don’t know what to do with that. Everyone in the Lakers played against in the bubble had the same set of circumstances, but when comparing the 2020 champs to preceding and succeeding champions, the Lakers and their aging vets didn’t have to play a game, get on an airplane and play another game within 48 hours.

We can debate the asterisk title for the Lakers until we’re blue in the face. You have to play in the elements at the end of the day and the elements ended up being Disney World in the middle of July. We always hear about the mental anguish that players went through. I get it. Missing your family is tough. COVID restrictions get old. But don’t tell me this wasn’t also rich guy summer camp while regular people were locked away in their apartments. Golf, fishing, hanging with the fellas. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner catered for you. Shout out to the NBA for doing their best to make it as normal as possible. There are people that would’ve sawed off a foot to get to experience what these guys got to in a five-star Disney World resort. Not many sad faces in any of those vlogs Mathisse Thybulle did: