The Atlanta Hawks have a really, really intense Uno circle
NBA players spend a lot of time together needing to kill time. That occurs most commonly on the team plane, where flights can stretch for hours. Teammates can pass the time sleeping, watching movies, or playing card games like bourré with teammates. But very few have picked up a game most often played by bored and families and pre-adolescent children.
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Enter a fairly group of Atlanta Hawks, who have apparently embraced the card game Uno as an airplane pastime. According to a new feature from Scott Caciolla of The New York Times, the Uno circle takes the game seriously enough to banish members for missing games and adjust the rules to encourage more action:
It all started innocently enough when Jeff Teague, the team’s starting point guard, brought a deck of Uno cards on a trip last season. He gradually recruited several teammates — Bazemore, center Al Horford and guards Kyle Korver and Dennis Schroder — to start participating in a regular game.
The conventional objective — first player to get rid of all his cards wins — was enough to keep them interested, but they soon wanted to spice things up. So Bazemore and Schroder hatched the idea of adding some of the more notorious cards from at least two other decks — all the Draw 2s, Wild Draw 4s, Reverses and Skips. The players referred to the extra cards as “heat.” The game was born anew.
“I think everyone should play it that way, because it’s no-holds-barred,” [Kent] Bazemore said. “It’s the W.W.E. of Uno, man. It’s crazy.”
The games almost always continue from takeoff to landing, and each player is expected to be a full participant, with no excused absences. Guard Tim Hardaway Jr., who was a part of the group earlier this season, learned that lesson. After a couple of weeks spent honing his Uno expertise, teammates said, he wanted to take a break, if only for one flight.
“He said he was tired and wanted to rest,” Schroder said. “So we had to kick him out.”
The article is absolutely worth reading in full — I didn’t even mention reserve big man Mike Muscala’s reasoning for not wanting to join the Uno circle (he thinks he’d have to undergo an initiation) or their forced change of venue during a losing streak. It’s a hilarious look into how NBA players find creative ways to deal with the demands of the job.
Whether it contains any other insight into the mind of an NBA athlete is debatable. Those Hawks who don’t play Uno, including a committed Spades group featuring Paul Millsap and Thabo Sefolosha, seem a little confused by their teammates’ intensity. Perhaps it is best to accept the Atlanta contingent as an outlier and celebrate their uniqueness.
I am a little surprised, though, that one of the Hawks’ European-born players hasn’t tried to introduce Mille Bornes to the group. That’s a game for true cutthroats.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
