Government should’ve led way, not leagues
The sports world should not have been put in position to shut itself down this week. Look no further than the Knicks.
On Wednesday night, just an hour before Rudy Gobert's positive coronavirus test stopped American sports for the foreseeable future, there was a Woj bomb.
Before Gobert's positive test, ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski reported, some teams wanted to stop playing entirely; others wanted to keep playing and ban fans. “One team wanted to keep status quo until a governmental/public mandate dictated change,” the report said. That team was the Knicks. (Woj later amended his reporting to say that the Pacers' and Rockets' owners felt the same way.)
By that time, Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health's director of infectious diseases, had already strongly recommended at that point that the NBA play without crowds.
“We would recommend that there not be large crowds,” Fauci said when a Republican congressman had asked him if the Ivy League — at that point the biggest American sports entity to cancel its seasons — was overreacting, or if the NBA was lagging in its response.
“If that means not having any people in the audience when the NBA plays, so be it,” Fauci said. “But as a public health official, anything that has large crowds is something that would give a risk to spread.”
It was grimly comforting that even in an uncertain pandemic — even as Donald Trump made mistakes so bad he admitted to them — that James Dolan remained exactly the same. Going by the ESPN report, Dolan's Knicks heeded Fauci's expert advice in the same way they've traditionally heeded expert advice from salary cap advisors.
Still, a hypothetical followed by “so be it” is not exactly a firm directive from an official with the power to enforce it. Two days later, though, it remains the single strongest piece of guidance from the federal government to the American sports world, which has shut down almost completely in that short span.
Dolan was characteristically reckless to push for the status quo when the winds were blowing so strongly in the opposite direction. But he did have a germ of a point. Why the hell should questions of public health be up to the NBA? Why should the safety of thousands of people, who could maybe spread a virus to millions, be in the hands of men like James Dolan? In a world where owners cannot be trusted to act wisely in their own interests without the aid of salary caps and max salaries, why should those same people be trusted to act wisely in the interest of the public?
Which of course leads to an even more horrifying truth. The right person to make those decisions was not Adam Silver, not Rob Manfred, not Mark Emmert. It was Donald Trump. Those men are rich lawyers whose job is to protect the consortiums of much richer businessmen. They are not public health experts or elected officials.
The coronavirus outbreak has laid bare that in our alleged democracy, private corporations have a total free hand to make decisions that help or hurt tens of millions of people. In that system, it's not worth it to praise the ones that made “good” decisions like the NBA belatedly did, or rip the ones that dragged their feet like MLB and the Big East. The decisions should be taken out of their hands entirely.
Maybe the strangest sight in sports on Thursday was the first half of a St. John's-Creighton game that was played while every single other major Division I conference canceled its men's basketball tournaments. When commissioner Val Ackerman finally emerged to cancel the tournament and defend her extreme lateness in doing so, she pinned it on New York public health officials, who supposedly told her it was safe to play games without fans.
If it was safe to play the games, elected officials should have publicly said so. If the NBA had been right to cancel its season, the federal government should have said that too. Instead, Trump spent Wednesday night retweeting Twitter Moments about the NBA closing and quoting Fox News attacks on Nancy Pelosi.