Ujiri confident in NBA plan despite Florida surge
But as confident as they may be, they were not planning to head to COVID-19 hot spot
Masai Ujiri said all the things that you would expect him to say, as the Toronto Raptors and the National Basketball Association sputter back to life and try to finish their seasons amid a pandemic.
“Everyone is geared up to play and excited,” the Raptors president said on Monday. He said the NBA was “a seriously well-oiled machine” and that the COVID-19 protocols and guidance that the league has put in place allows for a safe environment for its employees. Ujiri said he didn’t have to convince any of the Raptors that taking part in a restarted season was a good idea.
But, on Ujiri’s media conference call, there were also a couple of reading-between-the-lines moments. The Raptors are presently based in Fort Myers, Fla., where they’re in the middle of a mini training camp before joining 21 other teams at the Walt Disney World “campus” in Orlando. This feels a little like trying to avoid a sunburn by taking a nap outdoors on a foil blanket. Florida is dealing with giant increases in confirmed coronavirus cases, with more than 5,000 added to the count on Monday, the fifth time in the past six days that new cases cracked that mark. Canada surpassed 2,000 daily new cases just once over the whole pandemic. Meanwhile, more than 13 per cent of reported results in Florida on Monday came back positive, which suggests the new case numbers are not about to decline. (Canada’s current positive rate is less than one per cent.) Florida has now forbid the sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants in an attempt to quell the rising COVID-19 caseload.
Asked about spending all that time in Florida, Ujiri said “you have to make plans” and “you have to set things in motion.” He didn’t come out and say that he wished things had unfolded differently, but it was an acknowledgment that, as the NBA, and the Raptors in particular, dealt with the complicated process of returning in a coronavirus world, they had to make decisions weeks ago, which gave the virus plenty of time to do its own thing. And it has.
Lee County, which includes Fort Myers, hasn’t been hit as hard as Miami, or even as hard as Orlando, but there was still an alarming 24 per cent positive rate on test results reported on Monday. Ujiri said the Raptors players and staff are staying at a hotel specifically reopened for them, and that everyone is going back to their rooms after practice. Good call, that.
But as confident as the NBA and the Raptors might be in their protocols, there is no point in pretending like they were ever planning to head straight into a coronavirus hot spot. In mid-april, approximately seven lifetimes ago, NBA commissioner Adam Silver was asked what kind of information the league would consider as it decided how to resume its business. The first thing he said: “I think we’re looking for the number of new infections to come down.” That isn’t true of the United States as a whole, and it certainly isn’t of Florida, even allowing for significantly increased levels of testing.
Silver acknowledged as much on Friday, saying that COVID-19 “is on the rise in the majority of states in the United States right now, and my ultimate conclusion is that we can’t outrun the virus and that this is what we’re going to be living with for the foreseeable future.”
Essentially, the league is falling back on its bubble strategy, hoping that even if the spread of the virus accelerates in Florida, it can keep it from significantly impacting its operations at Disney. “We are in essence protected from cases around us,” Silver said. “At least, that’s the model.” Best-laid plans, et cetera.
It’s worth noting at this point that the NBA, like the NHL and its two-city plan, are too far into the race to change horses. Do they want to resume their seasons because there is a lot of money at stake? Of course they do. But these have been big-money businesses for many decades; we are long past the point when organized sports meant getting a few local fellows with glorious facial hair together to battle for the honour of their hometown. And with the salary pool in basketball and hockey tied specifically to the amount of money those leagues bring in, the players have a big stake in ensuring that those revenues don’t completely crater this season. They want this to work, too.
But will it? Ujiri, at least, is hopeful. He said the Raptors are all following the rules, wearing masks outside their rooms, being careful.
So much, though, remains uncertain. If a player tests positive, he will be quarantined, and all his contacts would be immediately retested. So while a team could deal with a single result like any other injury, a team-wide outbreak would be something else. As would be multiple outbreaks. No one really wants to deal with that would mean, yet.
“I think we just want to get down on the ground and start to see how our testing is working and how the protocols are working and then we’ll make decisions as we go,” Silver said.
The commissioner said they haven’t identified a tipping point at which the season would have to be shuttered, and it’s a safe bet that one won’t be publicly revealed. The NBA doesn’t want to put down a line that it might have to step past a month from now.