Nets owner helps donate 2,000 ventilators to NY
Nets owner Joe Tsai is helping New York breathe easier.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that Tsai and the Chinese government helped facilitate the donation of 1,000 ventilators that will arrive Saturday at JFK airport. Tsai had donated another 1,000 ventilators to the city’s Mount Sinai hospital system earlier in the week.
In addition, the Nets and Knicks collaborated with the NBA and China to contribute 1 million surgical masks for New York’s essential workers, according to Cuomo.
It will provide muchneeded relief for the suffocating hospitals and patients in New York, which is the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis with 113,704 confirmed cases.
Tsai, the billionaire cofounder of Alibaba (which is the Chinese equivalent of Amazon), is reportedly worth $10.4 billion and has come through in a pinch. In addition to the ventilators, Tsai has pledged to pay all hourly employees at Barclays Center through at least May despite the arena being shutdown indefinitely. It is the most generous gesture from New York sports owners towards their arena employees.
The lack of ventilators — and the slow response from the federal government to assist New York — prompted Cuomo into a controversial action Friday, when he signed an executive order declaring the state can seize the equipment and redistribute them to places in dire need.
“We do not have enough ventilators. Period,” Cuomo tweeted. “I am signing an Executive Order allowing the state to take ventilators and redistribute to hospitals in need.
“The National Guard will be mobilized to move ventilators to where they are urgently required to save lives.”
New York endured 630 deaths on Friday which left the state’s tragic toll at 3,565. Most of those fatalities — 2,624 — have been inside the five boroughs.
Cuomo thanked Tsai, Jack Ma (the other co-founder of Alibaba), Consul General Huang and the Chinese government for the donation of 1,000 ventilators.
Tsai purchased the Nets from Mikhail Prokhorov last year for a reported $2.35 billion, not long after the franchise signed Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant. He was born in Taiwan and attended Yale University.