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Dudley: 'We shouldn't have signed off on' keeping family from bubble

Jesse D. Garrabrant / National Basketball Association / Getty

For the first time since early July, players on NBA teams remaining in the bubble will be able to see their family members in person.

Prior to the end of the first round of the playoffs, the NBA's Disney World campus was restricted to players, coaches, and a limited number of team personnel. Los Angeles Lakers veteran Jared Dudley thinks the players should never have agreed to such conditions.

"(If) we do another bubble, we can't do it without family," Dudley told GQ's Michael Pina. "That's something that cannot happen. You can't wait until after the first round. We shouldn't have signed off on that."

Though long road trips are a part of any season, nothing in NBA history compares to the current situation.

Dudley said the scope of the restrictions facing the players wasn't immediately clear from the onset.

"Not only can (people outside the bubble) not understand, but some of the rules we didn't even know until we got here," he said. "It's not like we knew exactly what we were getting into."

Dudley said the players' family members must quarantine for seven days if they don't travel directly from the team's home city via a private charter. If they travel by the team plane, however, the self-isolation period drops to four days.

"So if my family is living in Atlanta, they've got to quarantine for an extra few days because they're not flying from L.A. with the team plane," Dudley said. "There was so much stuff. They could only come on one date, so now they can’t pick the date they want to come.

"We didn't find all that information until we got here."

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