For those of you who don’t already know, the NBA is set to be restarting their season in Walt Disney World in Orlando. Due to safety measures, the players have been quarantined among themselves in Disney resorts down in Florida. The NBA is well aware that it needs to keep its stars happy especially at a time when the team could potentially be facing a three-month quarantine.

Following a laborious and exhaustive scouting process to find barbers for the players, the NBA is finally putting the finishing touches on its plan. After news of players breaking their COVID-19 quarantine bubble to get some fast food, the league had to come up with creative solutions to keep the team safe and entertained. In efforts to do so, they announced a pop-up barbershop in their Disney World bubble.

However, NBA fans couldn’t help but draw connections between the pop-up bubble barbershop move and the NBA 2K video game franchise’s influence on real life. In the game, players can take their avatars to get haircuts, tattoos, as well as accessories. It’s an odd instance of “life mimicking art” when the league decided to bring the video game aspect to real life and allow players the luxury of getting fresh cuts while quarantined. 

Though there were doubts among players and fans that the bubble environment would be conducive to the proper safety required to restart the season, NBA and Disney have assured that the bubble environment will be rigorous, and testing will be thoroughly monitored. It is a very exciting moment to have the restart of the 2019-2020 season announced, and adding extraneous luxuries such as a pop-up barbershop will bring the morale up a notch. 

Whether the league has borrowed ideas from the video game or not, bringing barbershops back to life in such a way is a success in and of itself.

Photo via Tiago Splitter/Twitter