At least they can hear you. Kind of. Thanks to web cams and the sharp knives in the NBA mar­ket­ing draw­er who made vir­tu­al fan­dom cool, they can even see a 2‑D feed of you. Or your dog.

But they can’t feel you.

They can’t feel you in the final five min­utes, when the Nuggets are down four at “home” and need a stop to get mojo flow­ing the oth­er way.

They can’t feel you call­ing for MPJ to get the rock.

They can’t feel you ris­ing, as one, after Bol Bol does the same.

No dog pulls the sled, late, the way a Pep­si Cen­ter crowd does in crunch time. The Nuggets are 14–8 in post­sea­son home games since 2010, win­ning at a clip of 63.6% inside The Can.

But what hap­pens with­in the 2020 NBA Play­offs brack­et — played out at Walt Dis­ney World, 1,843 miles from Chop­per Cir­cle — when you take away that crowd? That sixth man? That alti­tude? How does that change the equation?

“If there is a sea­son that some­body like a Den­ver could win it, sur­prise peo­ple, sure, I guess (it’s this one),” ESPN NBA ana­lyst Jalen Rose said recent­ly. “But if the Clip­pers and the Lak­ers are healthy … if a team upsets them, it’s just because they didn’t per­form well.”

Either that or they missed something.

Or some­body.

Or sev­er­al somebodies.

Few home courts, tra­di­tion­al­ly, tilt the scales as much as an NBA play­off home court does. For the under­dog, it’s the great equal­iz­er, the friend­ly con­fines that can set the world right. For the favorite, it’s the path earned as a reward for months of reg­u­lar-sea­son dom­i­nance, the equiv­a­lent of the last at-bat in base­ball, the final word of the argument.

Since 1950, a road team has won a Game 7 on anoth­er squad’s floor just 28 times. That’s by design.

This set-up, by con­trast, feels like some­thing designed by M.C. Esch­er at the inter­sec­tion of top­sy and turvy. Orlando’s bub­ble could play out more like an NCAA Tour­na­ment set­ting, a neu­tral floor where tal­ent, matchups, defense and size ulti­mate­ly claw to the top.

Or a mid-major — look­ing at you, Port­land — can come from out of nowhere, shoot the lights out, and send a sure thing home.

“Clinch­ing the one seed, is there an advan­tage here?” Lak­ers star LeBron James pon­dered ear­li­er this month. “There’s not much of a home-court advan­tage here.”

James’ Lak­ers, the top seed in the West, are 3–5 in the bub­ble so far. The Blaz­ers, the West’s No. 8 seed, are 6–2.

“Nobody is safe in this envi­ron­ment, peri­od,” a West­ern Con­fer­ence exec­u­tive recent­ly told Joe Var­don of The Ath­let­ic. “Every­one can be beaten.”

The Nuggets and Jazz, who’ve been paired off in a first-round series that starts Mon­day, both post­ed 3–5 records, too.

Utah’s post­sea­son home win­ning per­cent­age over the pre­vi­ous 10 sea­sons — 42.1% — is the low­est among the eight play­offs teams in the West. The Clip­pers (46.9) and Mav­er­icks (62.5), who’ll draw the win­ner of Nuggets-Jazz, rank sev­enth and fifth, respectively.

Pep­si Cen­ter: 5,190 feet above sea level.

Dis­ney World: 125 feet.

They can’t feel you climb­ing up the ref’s back after the blind so-and-so slaps Skin­ny Jok­er with a bogus foul down the stretch.

They can’t feel your relief when the Blue Arrow drains a floater in the lane a tick before the shot clock expires.

“It’s like, ‘Home-court advan­tage?’ There’s no home-court advan­tage,” Rock­ets sharp­shoot­er James Hard­en told scribes in July. “It’s you ver­sus us and we’ll just have to fig­ure it out.”

If the Nuggets are going to climb to heights unseen since 2009, they’re going to have to fig­ure out a way to do it with­out you. And that’s just going to feel weird.