When professional athletes win championships, sometimes they're paid to make an announcement.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Michael Jordan and the Bulls, you just won your first NBA championship. what are you going to do next?
MICHAEL JORDAN: We're going to Disney World.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Yeah.
CHANG: But this year, the championship will be at Disney World. The NBA season restarts tonight. Twenty-two teams have assembled in a corner of the giant Disney resort in Orlando, Fla.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The players are tested for the coronavirus every day. The games are played in empty gyms without fans.
CHANG: And once players are on campus, they have to stay there. It's being called the NBA bubble.
SHAPIRO: At first, what happened inside the bubble was a mystery. But then reporting started to come out from the players themselves.
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MATISSE THYBULLE: People in hazmat suits are here to test me. Let's see how this goes.
CHANG: Matisse Thybulle is a rookie on the Philadelphia 76ers. He's been making videos about his time in the bubble. They're about everything - from the perils of eating alone in quarantine...
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THYBULLE: What's tragic is I don't have a fork. Oh, maybe I'm supposed to use the lid as a spoon. No.
CHANG: ...To spirited conversations with teammate Tobias Harris about resuming the season as Black Lives Matter protests erupt throughout the country.
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TOBIAS HARRIS: We don't want to be here and just throw on some T-shirts and think that's getting the job done. So, like, we have to back something real that is going to allow us to actually see and create real change.
SHAPIRO: Thybulle does all the recording and editing himself, and the videos have been a huge viral hit.
THYBULLE: I just thought, you know, like, a couple of thousand people or a couple hundred people might watch. I didn't think I'd have a million views.
CHANG: Another prolific documentarian of the bubble is JaVale McGee, better known here in LA as the starting center for the Lakers.
JAVALE MCGEE: I always wanted to be a producer, but obviously I'm about 7-foot tall and extremely athletic, so I decided to go another route.
SHAPIRO: McGee's documented his time in the bubble from the moment he said goodbye to his family. And in Disney, he has seen a whole new world.
MCGEE: We converted literal hotel rooms into working businesses. So we have a barbershop. We have a beauty shop. We have an ice tub room where it's a literal ice tub in the middle room - no bed, none of that; just the ice tub.
CHANG: And, of course, the players will be playing games with no crowds.
MCGEE: They throw in crowd noises sometimes, and it's kind of weird. I feel like we're in "The Truman Show."
CHANG: It's a new environment, but it's the same league. And for players like Thybulle, it's opened the door to telling his own stories.
THYBULLE: I didn't realize the effect that these videos could have, but I've realized as doing it the door that I've opened to players creating their own content. We're the show, essentially.
SHAPIRO: So as the NBA squeezes into its Disney bubble, fans can now get a little closer to athletes. Turns out it's a small world after all.