In the Christmas Day game, the Glory Team successfully beat the Trail Blazers and took this "face-saving battle" for Gan Guoyang.
After the game, the whole arena cheered for Gan Guoyang, and Gan Guoyang wished the fans a happy holiday.
It was still daytime, and the whole team rushed straight to the airport, took the chartered plane back to Las Vegas, and could reunite with their families to spend Christmas together.
In the airport and on the plane, Gan Guoyang and Michael Jackson’s duet "Baby" actually started playing. This hit single, released last season, was still stuck on the charts like an unmovable nail house, which showed just how influential it was.
Back home, he turned on the TV, flipped through newspapers and websites, checked the news, and let his brain relax a bit.
Gan Guoyang found that most of the news was either entertainment—pop music and movies—or the aftershocks of 9/11.
Where was America planning to bomb today, Bush was aiming at Iraq again, what measures and preparations were being made everywhere in the name of security, which security laws were being revised, what the FBI and CIA were planning to do to protect the public’s safety.
In a word—boring.
Gan Guoyang actually missed the lousy-economy ’80s and the colorful ’90s a little.
He remembered that back then all kinds of interesting news kept popping up, with major social events one after another.
The two superpowers of the Cold War faced off, Eastern Europe eventually underwent upheaval, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the world was changing in major ways almost every day.
And now? The Cold War had been over for more than a decade, and the grand projects America had once launched to counter the Soviet Union—including all sorts of concessions to the middle class—had all shifted along with the change in the global landscape; some vanished, some went bankrupt, and completely turned into people’s memories of the last Time.
After 9/11, the military focus turned to counterterrorism—firing cannons at mosquitoes all day long—so the US Army’s development direction shifted, and the high-spirited energy and heroism America had in the ’90s was leaking away bit by bit.
Reflected in the NBA, they were still relying on the stars of the ’80s and ’90s to hold things up; old-school basketball blood still flowed through them.
But the group of players entering the League in the 21st century would gradually show fans a different spirit and on-court vibe—and 2003 was just around the corner.
After the Christmas game, Las Vegas Radiance played two stinkers in a row, losing back-to-back to the New Orleans Hornets and Atlanta Hawks.
The Hornets had moved from Charlotte to New Orleans and swapped divisions with the Glory Team, coming to the Western Conference for a season.
The Christmas Day win had made everyone in the Glory Team a bit complacent, especially the two old heads, who didn’t take regular-season wins and losses that seriously anymore.
Once things weren’t going their way that night, if the rhythm felt off, they just wouldn’t force it, keeping their energy in the tank and saving it for the next game.
Then when the game ended, they started throwing blame around. One would say the other guy wasn’t playing seriously, kept forcing things while in terrible form and bricking every night.
The other would say that guy only knew how to stand there with his hands on his hips on defense, but when it came to running the fast break he was more active than anyone; his numbers looked good, but his actual impact on the floor was all negative.
The two of them just kept sniping at each other and shifting blame. On any other team, if your core guys were calling each other out like this, it’d mean the locker room had already imploded and it’d be time to start talking trades.
Only on the Glory Team was this nothing more than a little postgame skit for the two of them to unwind and ease the awkwardness of losing; nobody took it to heart.
Even after losing to the Hornets and Hawks, the Glory Team still finished their 2002 campaign—and entered 2003—with the best record in the League.
Throughout January, the Glory Team played pretty smoothly. They had lots of home games this month, and most of the opponents were Eastern teams, so the pressure wasn’t that heavy.
The team was mainly facing two problems: injuries and fatigue.
Ewing sprained his ankle on January 3 in the game against the Boston Celtics and would miss at least three weeks.
Ewing was already at that age; his body was covered in old injuries and he was basically half-retired.
Just coasting was fine, but once he had to crank it up against a strong team like the Boston Celtics, he just couldn’t handle it.
Injuries have a chain effect: once one guy goes down, you change the rotation, everyone else’s load goes up, and injuries follow one after another.
On January 9, Malik Rose dislocated his wrist in the game against the Warriors and needed to sit for a while.
The pressure on the Glory Team’s interior increased, and Yao Ming’s minutes went way up.
By the time the All-Star break was approaching, Yao Ming started to feel worn out. With half the schedule gone, he’d already played 40 games—basically a full CBA season.
But the NBA was still in full-on battle mode; the intensity and physicality of the games were only ramping up, and Yao Ming was starting to struggle.
This was also the second big issue facing the Glory Team from top to bottom: fatigue.
Aside from rookies like Yao Ming not being used to the NBA schedule, another reason was the travel distance.
Las Vegas is in Nevada, in the southwestern part of America, but the team’s division was in the Eastern, so they had tons of games out in the Great Lakes Region, the East Coast, and the South Coast.
Back when they were in the Western Conference, they only had about three long Eastern road trips a season. This year, the number of long trips had doubled, and as the schedule wore on, the fatigue kept piling up.
It wasn’t just the players—team staff, the coaching group, even the flight crew were all getting sick and tired of the more frequent long-haul flights. Everyone was hoping they could go back to the Western Conference next season and not stay in the Eastern anymore.
That way, most road trips would just be loops around California, Arizona, and the like, with only the occasional long haul, instead of flying out to the frozen tundra of Milwaukee right at the start of the season like they were now.