In case you missed it, here’s a tale of an American team bonding while on a European tour – though the reportedly highly effective tactic is unlikely to be deployed by the Doc Riverses of the basketball world any time soon.
Though mostly kept quiet at the time, an August trip to Paris taken by the University of Virginia featured an incident in which all 12 Cavaliers were trapped in a single elevator for 45 minutes. Head coach Tony Bennett explained that, while the capacity limit for the lift was marked as 13 or fewer passengers, “Twelve of them is probably the equivalent of, I don’t know, 15 normal people.”
Maybe they meant *metric* people, coach…?
The harrowing experience was handled well by all and Bennett was able to leverage the incident for team gain: “We talked about team bonding and being close. I think that’s as close as you can get for an hour in that tight a spot.”
University of Virginia Athletics yesterday posted a video of the Cavaliers’ mishap which has yet to become embeddable, but the claustrophia-inducing clip may be seen here. (Don’t worry: It’s been trimmed to just over one minute.)
So let’s see the Boston Celtics try this!
