On the Road With Brandin Podziemski, Who Learned How to Nap from Steph Curry

Few people on earth travel as often as professional athletes. With On the Road, the GQ Sports Travel Questionnaire, they’re weighing in on everything from room service to flying comfortably to their favorite chain restaurants.

Being an NBA player offers a little bit of something for everyone. If you want to check out the buzziest restaurant in every city, go for it. If you want to partake in a given town’s, ahem, nightlife, clubs will gladly open their doors. Or if you're like Golden State Warriors sharpshooter Brandin Podziemski—which is to say you want to just explore a city on foot and maybe get some shopping in—that’s more than doable, too.

Podziemski is currently in his second season with the Warriors, meaning he’s also in his second season of traveling the country with Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and Steve Kerr, whose collective celebrity far outweighs his own. That’s how Podziemski likes it, though. Being able to slink around anonymously is a huge perk for the left-handed shooting guard, who’s slowly developing some takes on which NBA cities he prefers and which ones are snoozers. As a rookie, he was trying to soak up as much information as possible about how to travel like a veteran, even if he wasn’t part of the actual veteran card table at the back of the plane. This year, he’s also braving the NBA circuit with Invisalign, which he’s been using for about ten weeks now. “I wear these for 22 hours a day,” Podziemski says, noting that his teammate and fellow Wisconsinite Kevon Looney put him on. “I wear ‘em while I play, I wear ‘em when I work out. I only take them out to eat and drink. It’s easy, convenient, and the case fits in my pocket. It’s been really simple for me.” (Luckily, Podziemski hasn’t left his Invisalign in a hotel room yet.)

He broke it all down for us in a recent conversation with GQ—and filled us in on things like typical NBA bedtimes, seeing Steph mania up close, and transferring from the Midwest to the Bay Area during college.

Podziemski was the 19th overall pick in the 2023 draft and quickly settled into his role with the Warriors. MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images

Being a rookie, you don’t understand how much travel you do until you do it. You’re trying to learn as much as you can on the fly. How do I get my necessary sleep? Everyone wants to get a certain amount of hours and go to bed at the same time every night. On the road, it’s really hard. You get done with a game, you fly somewhere else at midnight, you don’t get in until 2 or 3, and then if you have a back-to-back you have to get up early. Your sleep is really messed up. Learning how to get my body ready on the daily to perform the way I need to perform—given the circumstances of travel—that was the biggest thing for me.

Last night, we played at 7, got dinner around 10, had a lift…I went to bed probably around 1 or 2. And that’s for a home game! Depending on travel, maybe 3 am. After a game it’s hard for me to fall asleep, just from being geeked up. The adrenaline is going.

Nah, I definitely asked for advice. I’m under the impression that no question is a bad question. I just wanted to ask people who have done it before me, not be Mr. Tough Guy. Obviously, last year we had a bunch of guys who had been in the league for ten-plus years. So I just asked around to see what works.

Sleep is important! Try to get as much of it as you can. The hours will be up-and-down, all over the place, but sleep is when your body heals the most. I am a game day nap guy. I never used to be, but I know Steph is a big nap guy. I asked him what he liked about it, tried it, but there’s a healthy balance when it comes to the length of the nap. I try to go anywhere between 45 to 65 minutes and call it there.

No, I love my bed here. I feel like I get the best sleep here at home. But it’s different. We just had a five-game trip for 12 days. That’s five different cities, five different beds, five different pillows. Each hotel—obviously, really nice hotels—bring something different. Maybe the pillow’s too hard in one place, the pillow’s too soft, but my bed here has everything that I like.

I think, as a rookie, you’re excited to see what hotels you’re staying in and what the plane looks like, all the little things that the average fan doesn’t get to see. The first time around was cool, but once you play in the same place twice and stay in the same hotel twice, you’re like, I’m kind of sick of it. You’d almost rather just fly in on the day of the game and get out of there. That’s actually not allowed per NBA policy, just in case the flight gets messed up.

I traveled a lot via sports when I was younger, but it wasn’t these big cities. A lot of it was suburbs, so I didn’t really get to see what it was like. I’ve been to a lot of states in my life before the NBA, so I got to see quite a lot of things, but nothing on this level. If we have a day off it’s fun to go out. Last year a lot of people didn’t know who I was, so I could just roam free, find things for myself, and go see things. It’s really fun to do that.

I’ll tell you my least favorites! San Antonio, Memphis, Portland…Cleveland is okay. Those are the ones where you don’t want to spend more time there than you have to.

I think Utah has grown on me a little bit. The scenery, University of Utah is close, the mountains are right there. It’s obviously not something I prefer, but it’s nice to look at.

I think it’s how busy it is. The shopping, the food, how close things are to the hotel, the scenery. It’s a bunch of everything. There’s a bunch of cities that are good. I’m not a big LA guy, but we stay in Beverly Hills so Rodeo is right there, which is nice. I like doing that. Going home to Milwaukee is nice. Chicago is nice, Minnesota is nice, Dallas is nice. You obviously have Miami and Atlanta. My favorite city that we stay in is Toronto, though.

It’s tough. I think our performance and medical teams do a good job of getting our bodies ready after that first game. You can’t avoid the inevitable fatigue from the prior night. With those games, it’s more mental than physical. It’s the team who brings more effort. The harder you play, the more the game rewards you, even if you’re not physically at your best. If the other team has had a back-to-back too, that kind of evens the playing field. Who wants it more?

As a young guy, you have older guys who are more fatigued than you, so it’s your job to bring the best out of them, bring the energy, find a way for them to get excited to play two days in a row in different cities.

I enjoy it. Whether it’s getting off the bus or leaving the hotel, I try to walk with him. That way, I don’t get stopped. I can just keep walking because everyone wants Steph. From his perspective, I imagine it’s pretty crazy. It’s cool, but he can’t live a normal life, you know? I said that I like to go out in the cities and explore; he can’t. It’s always a crowd around him. Obviously, everything he’s gotten, he deserves. People love him for a reason, and it makes sense. But if I was in his shoes it’d be like, “Damn, I can’t just go to a restaurant and get some food? I gotta have it sent to the room?” I don’t know how fun that is for him.

Draymond, even some of our young guys who are up and coming like Jonathan [Kuminga], it happens to them too. If I’m fortunate enough to be in their position one day, how am I going to go about doing that? Because I still want to be a human at the end of the day.

I’m all good with that. Lay my seat back, put on some TV shows, call it a day.

Yeah, Chris didn’t like turbulence. Him, Draymond, Cory [Joseph], Steph, and Klay [Thompson] always used to play cards at the back of the plane, and Chris didn’t like when there was turbulence, for sure.

It was really cool. I would say the best experience for me was probably Pepperdine or BYU. Those are really nice cities in terms of scenery. Obviously, LMU [Loyola Marymount University] is in LA, which is nice. San Diego was cool because it’s by the water. Each of the schools in the WCC brings something different that they can hang their hat on. Before going to Santa Clara I had never been to the state of California, so that was my first taste. I enjoy it.

I wouldn’t say there was any culture shock. It’s just as diverse as Milwaukee. I’m used to being around different cultures and different types of people. The food’s a little different, and the weather. That was a good adjustment, the weather always being around 50 to 70 every day.

I did not know that!