Derek Fisher on Life in the NBA

In a deposition taken in July 2001 in a bankruptcy case involving Elbert Crawford III and his company, Ace Sports Management LLC, Los Angeles Lakers guard Derek Fisher described his life as a professional basketball player. The Little Rock native has played with the Lakers since the 1996-1997 season and is averaging 11.2 points a game this season. Here are excerpts from his sworn statement:

“Training camp normally starts around the first of October …And it’s about a two-week process. They’re basically whipping us into shape for the season, so it’s two weeks of just all-out intense practicing twice a day every day.

“There’s really not much time but for eating and sleeping to recuperate for the next day. We play preseason games for a couple of weeks in October …

“Our regular season starts in November. Without going into everything that we do, once you get to October basically the rest of your life is over. Once you hit October until however far your team makes it, there’s really no other priority than basketball. And I know it sounds funny because it’s a game, but it’s our profession. So once October comes, there’s really no other formal business that we really could conduct and be good at it during that period.

“… We play eight exhibition games, 82 regular season games and depending on how many games [we] play in the playoffs … it’s in excess of 100 games that I play probably every year that I’ve been in the league, because we’ve gone to the playoffs every year.

“… Forty-one games [are] at home, and 41 games [are] on the road.

“… [On a typical day] if we don’t have a game, we probably only get — depending on [Coach] Phil [Jackson’s] mood — we may get one day off in a week, but most of the time if we don’t have a game we’re practicing or watching film or doing something that makes us better. So we’ll probably meet at our practice facility at 10 a.m. We’ll be there any where from 10 to 12 or 10 to 2 depending on how involved our practice is and exactly what we’re doing.

“At that point the rest of the day is typically yours …

“On game day [it] is more of [a] mental preparation. We wake up pretty early. Most game days, we have a light practice at 10 a.m. We’ll meet from 10 till 11:30, and then we’ll break. We’ll have lunch, go back to our hotel, take a nap or do whatever it is you do to get prepared for the game.

“That space in-between the light practice and going back to the game, that’s your time to basically put yourself into what we call a warrior mode, where you really get yourself mentally prepared to go out and do battle later on that night.”