His name has appeared in the same box scores as Carmelo Anthony, Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum.

He’s currently living in the NBA’s heavily restricted bubble in Orlando. Instead of packed crowds at the Reilly Center or at State Farm Arena in his half-season stint with the Atlanta Hawks, he’s playing in front of no fans on one of the handful of newly-laid courts inside a complex at Walt Disney World.

For Jaylen Adams, however, this must be more welcomed than weird.

The former St. Bonaventure star has officially begun his second crack at the sport’s highest level, donning the black and red — and the No. 20 — of the Portland Trail Blazers as part of the NBA’s 2019-20 restart. He’ll get up to eight games and perhaps the postseason (though Portland is currently on the outside looking in) to make an impact with the Blazers and turn enough heads — whether with the Portland brass or elsewhere — to earn another opportunity heading into next year.

Adams saw time in both of the Blazers’ exhibition tuneups in the last four days. Portland will tip off its regular season restart on Friday against the Grizzlies, with one more preseason contest in between.

In a 91-88 loss to Indiana last Thursday, he logged only 2:41 in game action, but did pick up his first NBA bucket of the year after going coast-to-coast on a steal and grab two rebounds while finishing with a plus-5 rating. On Sunday, in a 110-104 setback to the defending champion Raptors, he didn’t score, but did earn seven minutes and a plus-6 rating.

At the moment, the big victory is in the fact that he played.

In those games, Portland listed 17 and 14 players on its roster, but played only 11 in each, and he was one of them.

BUT HOWEVER bizarre it’s been in the NBA bubble life — the Kings’ Richaun Holmes was put into quarantine after leaving those confines to pick up food delivery while the Clippers’ Lou Williams must also serve a 10-day stint after acknowledging that he went to an Atlanta strip club and will miss Los Angeles’ first two games back — that’s only a small slice of the sheer peculiarity that has enveloped sports as we know them.

In the last week alone, with the push for social justice reform also a contributing factor, Major League Baseball made a mostly successful return against the backdrop of empty ballparks, masked players and universal designated hitters; the NFL squad located in the nation’s capital changed its name, at least temporarily, to the Washington Football Team; and the NBA opened play in a theme park.

Over the weekend, we were introduced to cardboard cutout audiences, including a segment of such fans atop the Green Monster at Fenway Park, piped-in crowd noise and equal parts eerie and engrossing television broadcasts with CGI fans in the stands.

So much attention was placed on the return of the MLB and NBA seasons, and on the social justice front (the entire Yankees and Nationals rosters knelt before the national anthem was played prior to Thursday’s opener, but then stood for the song itself), that few seemed to notice that Mike Tyson, now 54, who last stepped into a ring 15 years ago, agreed to fight Roy Jones Jr. in an exhibition bout on Sept. 12.

What on Earth is happening?

THE MOST interesting component of the current COVID-19 sports world was the announcement that MLB’s Blue Jays will, in fact, be playing in Buffalo this summer after they were barred from traveling back and forth to Toronto and subsequent attempts to play in both Pittsburgh and Baltimore were denied. It took a global pandemic and a handful of ‘Nos’ for it to happen, but Buffalo will host Major League Baseball for the first time since 1915, when the Bisons were a member of the “third major league,” the Federal League.

The Jays, according to reports, won’t play their first home series at Sahlen Field until Aug. 11 in order to make a series of infrastructure modifications at the home of the Triple A Bisons. But no matter how it came to pass, it will be pretty cool to see Major League Baseball staged locally over the next two months.

And what a few months it figures to be.

Under normal circumstances, we’d just now be entering one of the quietest stretches on the sporting calendar.

But cardboard cutout fans? Baseball in Buffalo? An NFL football team with no name? A Seattle NHL team nicknamed the “Kraken”? The St. Bonaventure basketball teams residing within their own bubble on campus?

This was one of the weirdest weeks in sports history.

(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at jbutler@oleantimesherald.com)