Some explaining to do
Lowry’s absence raises questions about the NBA’s transparency
Maybe there’s nothing unusual about Raptors announcing Saturday that Kyle Lowry had been granted permission to remain at the team’s base in Tampa, Fla., rather than make the trip to Charlotte, N.C., for the opening pair of preseason games Saturday and Monday.
Maybe it only makes sense to rest a 34-year-old point guard in advance of the coming onslaught of a season that, beginning Dec. 23 against New Orleans, will see the Raptors play 72 games in something in the range of 145 days. Maybe the team is giving Lowry the weekend off for a few rounds of golf in the Florida sun. Heck, maybe he’s been granted leave to sit for the sculptor who will one day fashion the bronze rendering of Lowry that will one day flank Scotiabank Arena.
What’s also possible: Lowry has tested positive for COVID-19, and the team, on account of privacy rules, can’t tell a soul. Not that anyone can say for sure. Still, it raised eyebrows Saturday when Jalen Harris, the Raptors’ secondround pick in last month’s draft, told reporters he hadn’t had much interaction with Lowry during camp.
“We haven’t really seen him too much,” Harris said.
Head coach Nick Nurse chose his words carefully when speaking about Lowry before Saturday’s game. He reiterated what he’d said previously, raving about the shape Lowry is in and insisting he has no concern about Lowry missing pre-season games. Asked if Lowry had been held back to rest, Nurse concurred: “It’s basically for load management.”
Nobody is blaming Nurse for the hemming and hawing; the NBA’s policy puts coaches and management in a difficult position. Still, if Lowry’s omission from the travel list was a matter of limiting wear and tear, it’s hard to imagine the Raptors would be wrapping Lowry’s status in such murkiness. We’re now nearly a week into training camp, after all, and nobody outside the
“The lack of transparency … is certainly not ideal for handicapping games in the NBA,”
BILL KRACKOMBERGER PROFESSIONAL GAMBLER
team’s mysterious cone of silence can say for sure if Lowry has even participated in a full team workout or not. There’s no media on hand in Tampa, after all. There’s been little transparency in tightly controlled Zoom calls that pass for media conferences.
GM Bobby Webster was asked by a reporter earlier this week if all of Toronto’s players were available to practise.
“We’re not going to get into those specifics,” he said. “This is just privacy, right.”
All we can say for sure is the last time Lowry was seen by reporters, he was interrupting a Fred VanVleet video conference with reporters as camp opened Sunday. The following day the Raptors announced three members of the organization had tested positive for COVID, and insisted the names and occupations of those members would remain undisclosed.
Lowry has yet to meet with the media. And while Brooklyn’s Kyrie Irving was fined $25,000 (U.S.) by the league for “his refusal on several occasions this week to participate in team media availability,” Lowry, as of Saturday afternoon, had not been levied with any such fine.
Some NBA teams have chosen to spell out the situation slightly more clearly than the Raptors. When the Portland Trail Blazers had three members of the organization test positive for COVID this week, head coach Terry Stotts confirmed that one of those positive cases represented a player (although he wouldn’t say which player). As training camp opened this week the Golden State Warriors announced that two players — specifically “players,” not vague “members of the organization” — had tested positive for COVID. Not long after it emerged that precisely two players, veteran forward Draymond Green and rookie big man James Wiseman, had both missed practice for reasons the team was, wink-wink, unable to specify.
"I'm not allowed to comment. You can make your own deductions. I know it's really tricky," Kerr told reporters.
For a league now intent on profiting from gambling, it’s potentially problematic. Not that the NBA has ever had a problem with on-court personnel compromising the NBA’s integrity thanks to bad decisions, mob connections and an insatiable hankering for betting action. But any time crucial information that could affect the outcome of games is hoarded by a few people inside a closed circle, the door is opened, at least a smidgen, for unscrupulous insiders to make considerable profits.
“It’s like insider trading in the stock market,” Vic Salerno, the veteran Las Vegas bookmaker, told NBC a few months back. “(COVID status reports) will become insider information if they don’t become transparent. People are out there looking for every advantage. You can’t tell me that a player in the NBA gets the coronavirus and the team doesn’t know. The team (staffers) can tell their cousins or whomever.”
Earlier this fall there was a report that betting conglomerates were paying considerable sums for inside information on college football COVID reports. Observers in Vegas noticed unusual line movements in at least one game that could have only been explained by someone procuring non-public information about impending absences from the lineup as a result of the coronavirus.
The NFL, which has always made transparency a priority given its popularity as a betting entity, has been relatively forthcoming around the coronavirus. Players who test positive for the virus are placed on the COVID-19 list. There’s zero mystery.
Which is not to say there’s widespread outrage in Las Vegas on account of the NBA’s not-so-upfront approach.
“The lack of transparency … is certainly not ideal for handicapping games in the NBA,” Bill Krackomberger, the professional sports gambler and founder of krackwins.com, said in a text message.
Still, Krackomberger said that, in a league in which star players routinely sit out in the name of rest, NBA bettors generally don’t lay down money too far in advance of the tipoff.
“As such (the lack of COVID transparency) won’t alter my betting strategy significantly,” he said.
If there’s one reason why the league and its players are insisting on keeping positive tests private — this in a sport where any number of ailments are regularly disclosed — could come down to the persistence of a perceived stigma around the virus. Earlier this week VanVleet expressed his concern that players who test positive will be seen as having been somehow negligent which, to his way of thinking, would be ill-advised.
“We can't turn getting COVID into an indictment. We can't turn getting COVID as to we did something wrong,” VanVleet said.
“Nobody understands the full dynamic of what's going on. Now if you're going to pool parties at night and nobody's wearing masks, that's one thing. But if you have to go to the grocery store, or you have family in town, and you get it, you get it. That's just how it goes.
“I don't want to turn getting COVID or contracting it into an indictment on guys.”
Contracting the virus is hardly an indictment on anyone. As for shrouding it in unnecessary secrecy, it’s a puzzlingly backward-facing look for a forwardthinking league.