How COVID could determine the NBA title — ‘you pray that it does not influence the way the season ends’

As Warriors coach Steve Kerr was driving to work ahead of Game 4 of the Western Conference semifinals series, his focus wasn’t on the Memphis Grizzlies, but rather on his cough, his congestion, and the cases of COVID-19 that had popped up at the team’s San Francisco facility.

As cases of COVID waned around the country, the NBA made testing for the disease — once mandatory and daily — an effectively voluntary practice. In February, Kerr had, like so many of us, stopped wearing a mask when he was at work, on the sidelines. No one actually likes wearing them.

But the mask was back on for Game 3 of the series on the first weekend in May.

Then, Kerr tested positive for COVID two hours before Game 4. He missed that game, as well as Games 5 and 6 of the series — a Warriors win — and has now recovered from the “mild” case and will be on the sidelines for Wednesday’s start to the Western Conference finals.

“I just felt like ‘I better test,’ ” Kerr said, recalling his mindset on the drive to Chase Center. “If I pass this on to the team, I’ll never forgive myself.”

With new COVID cases rising increasing threefold since the start of April, per the New York Times, this disease offers a new threat to not only the Warriors, but the NBA as a whole.

It could absolutely determine the league’s champion in June.

We’ve come a long way since the beginning of the pandemic in this country — a moment that cannot be officially pinpointed but is often associated with the NBA and Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert’s positive test in Oklahoma City, which shut down the league for months.

We are, of course, well past the point of shutdowns and bubbles now. Arenas are full, after all. But while this latest COVID surge doesn’t compare to the peaks of the original Delta or

Omicron variants in scale or severity, this latest goaround with the disease is not to be overlooked.

The league postponed 11 games this season, the last being the Warriors’ game against the Nuggets on Dec. 30 — a contest where Denver had six players and three coaches in the league’s health and safety protocols. NBA rules require eight healthy players to play a game in both the regular season and the playoffs.

I’m told that the league has no hard and fast rule on postponing playoff games, outside of the eight-player limit. Given how there are only four teams remaining, the league can also take a more hands-on approach to navigating such a situation, should it arise, looking at things like cycle threshold values, which can measure how positive — and, ergo, how contagious — a positive test is.

And while games can be moved — World Series games are rained out all the time — with millions in ad revenue on the line, the NBA is obviously not keen to ask their television partners to shuffle their schedule at this juncture in the season.

The games will go on. Luckily, postponing games has not proven necessary since the calendar flipped to 2022, and the league is confident that will not change at this juncture of the playoffs.

But the disease can still have a huge effect on these critical games.

While the NBA’S playin tournament is not, technically, the playoffs, you’d have a hard time believing that watching the action. That’s why it was stunning that Clippers star wing Paul George missed his team’s win-or-go-home play-in game with COVID. George was symptomatic and tested positive.

In the Warriors’ last series, against the

Grizzlies, Memphis big man Steven Adams missed the first two games after testing positive for COVID. Given how well he played once he did enter the fray, one can only wonder how affected Memphis was by his absence.

If Steph Curry or Draymond Green were to test positive for COVID in the coming days, the Warriors’ title hopes would unquestionably turn negative.

That’s why Kerr’s positive test, while it did not create a significant issue for the Warriors, does serve as a warning.

“This is still something we have to be alert with and protect against and have precaution in terms of how you’re moving through your day and who you’re going and who you’re around — how you spend your time outside this facility,” Curry said. “It’s a very sensitive time… you pray that it does not influence the way that this season ends.”

COVID cases are increasing across the Bay Area — up 20% over the last two weeks in San Francisco where the team plays and many players and staff live, 64% in Alameda County, 55% in Marin County, and 12% in San Mateo County, per the Times.

“It was just kind of my turn,” Kerr said of his stint off the Warriors bench. “It seem like, last couple of years, practically everybody on our coaching staff and our team has had it at some points… it was just my turn.”

And while the team is fully vaccinated — once a requirement to play games in San Francisco — the current, circulating sub-variants of omicron have shown an ability to elude vaccines and reinfect those with natural immunity.

On the court, every athletic action could bring about a negative consequence. Every drive to the basket could bring about a hard foul or a twisted ankle. The of injury threat is omnipresent but compartmentalized, especially in playoff games, which are appreciably more physical.

But with COVID on the rise again, there’s an omnipresent, invisible threat to winning a title off the court, as well.

“So far, so good,” Curry said. “We’ll just try to control what we can control.”

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