JUDGMENT DAY IS COMING

Lou Williams’ alleged strip club trip shows how easily NBA bubble could spring a leak

You wanted good news, and sports is providing some. So far, the NBA bubble is holding, and baseball is back, and the only thing the NFL has had to sacrifice is its bloated preseason.

Whether it was right or wrong to try defying both reason and a pandemic, at least it’s been something other than a disaster. In a year like this, most fans made out of something other than cardboard are happy to see it.

But the odds say difficult times lie ahead, even in the bubble and even in front of virtual crowds, and every league from the professional ranks to middle school volleyball had better be prepared to make an important decision.

It’s not about how much good news they can generate by playing these games.

It’s about how much bad news they can stomach and still keep going.

Maybe they’ll all get lucky and never have to calculate that horrible formula. That would be wonderful, because the past few days have reminded all of us how nice it can be to care just a little bit about trivial championship pursuits, and how fun it can be to watch elite athletes do what they do best. Nobody wants to take another four-month break from that, ever again.

But there’s an ominous riskreward component to this, and that’s not true only of Los Angeles Clippers guard Lou Williams’ reported excursion to a strip club during his excused absence from the NBA’s Disney World campus.

Positive coronavirus tests will come. For any given league, or for any given franchise, or for any given college program, how many are too many to keep going? Five players on a basketball team? A dozen guys on a football team?

For those organizations operating outside the protection of a bubble, how far are they comfortable letting any potential outbreaks spread? Would one college football player’s family member being hospitalized with COVID-19 be too many? Two? Three?

This is not meant to sound cold, or heartless, or even cynical. These are realistic consequences of restarting sports, and if decision-makers have not yet considered these questions, they’re doing themselves, their employees, and their teams a huge disservice.

Already, Major League Baseball has shown that certain pieces of bad news do not meet its threshold for cancellation. On the sport’s long-awaited opening day Thursday, Juan Soto, the best young player on the reigning World Series champion Washington Nationals, learned he had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Days before, he had played in an exhibition game after being tested.

That same day, the Arizona Diamondbacks announced that Dominican Republic-based scout Johan Maya, who spent 15 years working for the Astros and once championed a small young Venezuelan named Jose Altuve, died from COVID-19 complications. Maya was 40.

The games went on.

This is not meant to be a judgment on whether the games should have gone on. But that judgment will come eventually, and everyone involved in this had better understand that.

Sports executives and administrators and athletic directors are used to being criticized for screwing up a trade, or hiring a bad coach. If they’re second-guessed this time, the stakes will be considerably higher.

Williams’ alleged trip to a nightclub, which according to ESPN is being investigated by the league and might force him into an extended quarantine, illustrates one of the ways the NBA bubble might spring some leaks. And that’s in the league best equipped — both financially and logistically — to keep players and staff safe.

MLB players are tested twice per week, but they’re traveling from city to city and sleeping in either hotels or their own homes. NFL owners and players came to an agreement about how to minimize the risk of coronavirus spread when its season arrives this fall, but the huge rosters and high-contact nature of the sport makes it ridiculous to believe a whole season could be played without at least a few positive tests.

And college football? This, from the beginning, seemed like the most ill-advised attempt at a restart, and not only because the participants are unpaid. If universities maintain it’s still not safe for regular students to congregate on their campuses, it’s both hypocritical and shameful to allow athletes to do it, whether the sport generates billions of dollars or not.

If you’re skeptical, you have good reason to be. In the span of about 24 hours Friday and Saturday, two Big Ten programs placed their entire football teams in quarantine in response to coronavirus outbreaks. Michigan State’s shutdown came after a staffer and a player tested positive, and Rutgers’ came after announcing six positive tests in the latest round of player testing.

This is the bad news, and the only certainty is there will be more.

We’ll see how much of it sports is willing to chalk up to the price of doing business.