With the coronavirus pandemic gripping much of society and four Nets having tested positive for COVID-19, Joe Harris reassured fans he is healthy — albeit stuck in quarantine and having to find creative ways to do what he’s best known for: shoot the rock.
“Yeah, everybody is good health-wise thankfully,” Harris said Monday in an Instagram Live session on the NBA account. “Obviously crazy times for everybody, but definitely fortunate on my side of things that everything is going well.”
With the NBA season having been suspended March 11, four Nets tested positive for coronavirus shortly thereafter. All are fine now, but with teams locked out of their facilities and players practicing safe social distancing, it’s been a challenge to try to stay in shape if and when play resumes.
Harris got a stationary bike from the Nets, receives daily workouts from the performance team and has been doing body-weight exercises over the past few weeks. But his mind works like a shooter, so that’s what the 3-point champ nicknamed “Joey Buckets” by his teammates instinctively finds himself doing, even in his apartment.
“I have some basketballs around, I have enough space in my apartment where I can tinker around with some different basketball training apps like HomeCourt, do some different dribbling drills,” Harris said. “Then just little form shooting, if you’re sitting on the couch just watching Netflix hanging out I can just sit there shooting like you would back in the day when you were a kid, just laying there thinking about different scenarios, shooting the ball in your hands.
“I’ll just sit there doing some one-handed shots, left-handed [shots]. It’s one of those things if you’re just sitting there figuring out different ways of passing time. I’m not different than a lot of us; I love the game, I’m going to do different stuff with the basketball just passing the time.”
Harris not only loves basketball, but being in Brooklyn. In February, the pending unrestricted free agent said he hopes to re-sign with the Nets this summer, and Monday he told YES Network’s Ian Eagle he would love to remain a Net for life.
“In [an] ideal world, I’d play my whole career in Brooklyn,” Harris said.
“I came in with [GM] Sean [Marks] even the ownership. It’s just one of those things where you have a close connection with a lot of people that are within the organization. You kind of all came in together.
“Now I’ve been here for four years and built unbelievable relationships with everybody that’s a part of the organization. It’s amazing just to see where we’ve gone from Year 1 to now. And I obviously want to be a part of that, and a part of it for a long time.”