Disney is nice but for NBA's top teams, no place like home

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) — The Lakers and Bucks exited practice Wednesday to palm trees around them and sunny skies overhead.

The weather is good at Walt Disney World. The service is great. The setting seems ideal.

For the best NBA teams, it's anything but.

The top-four seeds in each conference should be playing in their arenas right now, with home-court advantage in the first two games of their playoff series. They'd have their fans screaming during the action and in many cases families waiting at home afterward.

Boy, do some of them miss that at the moment.

“If's definitely a difference. You can feel it,” Bucks All-Star Khris Middleton said. "There's times where we really depended on our crowd last year and during the season this year to kind of pull us out of our struggle or whatever it was. And here, there is none of that.

"We have to bring it every single night. We can't rely on our crowd, our fans to give us that energy. We have to bring it ourselves."

Milwaukee and Los Angeles, the No. 1 seeds in each conference, both bring 1-0 deficits into their games Thursday. So do the fourth-seeded Indiana Pacers, another “home” team in name only who dropped their opener against Miami.

Everyone at the bubble points out that it's the same for all of them. They've all been on this road trip for more than a month, all dealing with obstacles they never faced in another postseason.

But right now it's more hurting the teams that should be playing in front of rowdy fans, not virtual ones. The celebrities along the sidelines at Staples Center are part of an atmosphere that can make the Lakers so tough to beat at home, and the passion for basketball in Indiana means the Pacers can always count on a big backing in their arena.

And maybe it would have helped after...