With the COVID-19 health and safety protocols in place this season, there are no longer postgame scrums in locker rooms or even postgame press conferences at the podium. As has been the case for most every aspect of business over the last year, they are instead conducted via Zoom with the players and coaches at a seat with a monitor in front of them and questions asked by reporters, sometimes from elsewhere in the arena and sometimes from home.
On Wednesday night, as Doc Rivers answered questions from the virtually assembled Philly media one of our very own Dime contributors, Jackson Frank who covers the Sixers for Liberty Ballers, began his question but was interrupted by Doc, who had an important question to ask of his own: “Are you in bed right now?”
Don’t sleep on the Sixers @jackfrank_jjf pic.twitter.com/kdLZkRyVM2
— The Wooderboys Podcast (@wooderboys) February 18, 2021
The “Jesus Christ, Jackson” from Doc at the end of the clip has just maximum disappointed dad energy, and the entire Zoom breaking into laughter was great. It’s certainly not the first time a reporter has handled postgame interviews from bed, but it’s the rare occasion where they’ve been called out for it.
As a capital J Journalist, I had to reach out to my colleague to get his side of the story and, sadly, the man tried to deflect with semantics.
“I was laying ON my bed, not IN my bed, to be clear,” Frank told me, in his defense. He would continue to explain why this happened, noting he was not at his apartment but instead at his parents, where a bedroom without a desk was the only option.
“I’m visiting my parents and my mom was cooking dinner. They live in an apartment, so I don’t have a workspace anywhere,” Frank said. It’s a perfectly valid and reasonable explanation, but it won’t stop this from being an exceptionally funny moment.