What next
How long can the NBA push the product of basketball when that product becomes ghostly, spectral, a spotlight on what’s gone?
The weight of the days is wicking away. Up here, in the quiet and the snow, one day slips so easily into the next that their anchor points become actions, because even weather stays static. Going down to the frozen water to walk out to its middle and stare at the sun going down. Doing a scrum. Starting a fire. Watching Star Wars. Burning toast. Doing a phone interview. Walking the road and talking for the first time in weeks to other people at a fair distance, everyone awkward.
Lately I’ve been getting stuck on giving a year away so passively, but seeing the strain of it rendered plain on my face.
On a friend’s show this week I sat with a window behind me, closest spot with an outlet my charger could reach. We started and the light was bright, flattering, all-over. I watched the day change on my face, from golden to sinking to sunk, a different person than I’d been when we started, for the hour it took to talk about the week in basketball.
Depending on your threshold of how long before Covid-19 would sift into the NBA, this week was what we were holding our breath for. How long it would take for the game to stall without a bubble around it. Maybe your threshold is more severe — a serious case, god forbid, befalling a player — for things to be called to a halt. It doesn’t make you less sensitive. I think what’s plain by now is our response to, our ability to live with, and our general relaxing around Covid depends on its direct effect on us. If where we live is hard hit, or how personally we’ve felt the fallout. We all started united on universal fear. Not knowledge, or empathy, but fear, and it was strong enough to bind us for a season, one spring, but that’s slipped. And basketball, the product of it, couldn’t have come back without that loosening.
When the NBA set its start date this season it was a train pulling from the station, set on a track where it would only accelerate. For it to work there would be no stops. But this inevitable point we’ve hit, with a solid chunk taken out of the East and encroaching on the West, was always coming.
There are health and safety protocols in place but the proof they’re merely suggestion, to be applied team to team, came in Seth Curry’s positive test being returned, mid-game, while he sat on the Sixers’ bench against the Nets at Barclays and the game continued. Or in Jonas Valanciunas being pulled mid-game the next day, also against the Nets, due to “health and safety protocols” for contact tracing. But by the same logic, the Grizzlies and the Nets entire rosters (by then potentially doubly exposed), coaching and team staff, should have then been pulled, the game cancelled, because their proximity to Valanciunas settled them square “within 6 feet of an infected person for a total of 15 minutes or more”, the definition of contact tracing.
The NBA introduced some form of sensor to aid in contact tracing but only “Tier 1 and Tier 2” individuals are required to wear them “on the team plane, the team bus, during practices and to and from the arena or their home practice facility in connection with team travel”, and that “players are not required to wear the sensors during games or at the team hotel when traveling”.
In the same ESPN story reporting on the use of the sensors, an official was quoted as saying, "We don't want to have to needlessly quarantine someone that doesn't need to be.” But in deciding who is needful or not, prioritizing exposure and subsequent health by tiering it, any science-led or even straightforwardly thoughtful protocol is undermined.
We’re watching this happen with a looser expectation of what safety means, where its boundaries start, because for so long now these interpretations have stretched and varied.
The league had an optimal time to set a clear expectation, draw bold boundaries, with James Harden. Suspending him in addition to his quarantine. He’s a star, he’s visible, the message would have been clear. But there wasn’t a suspension, or much reckoning beyond that moment, because maybe the message was meant to be muddled.
It’s also not fair to say that a message needs to be made in this way for every player, the careful ones only going from home to game to hotel, most or many who are, like us in our own gradual slackening, living submerged in the same places, where fear is going from slow to roiling boil. Where in some cases community spread makes contact with Covid not just possibly but likely. And what about team staff? Or arena staff where fans are still able to attend games in-person? Ground-level people who make the whole, shuddering locomotive of the NBA’s product work.
What’s struck me as surreal about the slow climb in league cases is how Covid’s been added to the injury list. Along with shorthand like “foot”, “ankle”, “concussion”, now “Covid-19”. How easily my eyes move over the reason. How short form a pandemic, almost an entire year.
My brain understands the reference point, doesn’t stall, doesn’t press me with a why, when or how. And more than any other kind of injury there I understand this one better.
What a thing to become glancing. To get used to.
I have no answer or critique to what now, for fans or writers or media, because all of it has been parcelled out to circumstance — where you are watching from and what you’ve seen of the pandemic up to this point — in what’s been the great and necessary failing of humanity in a crisis. Irresponsible, callous, and brains, exhausted.
My friends Anastasia and Agata have said they will stop talking about the season on their show, a show about basketball, until conditions are made safer. I understand that, applaud that, and it makes me angrier because it is on the league, ultimately, to set the standard. A standard they’ve already made clear is to uphold the product: basketball being played, over what will limit it. Even if what’s going to be the most limiting of all will be when teams are so riddled with players out due to exposure, to infection, that the product becomes ghostly, spectral, a spotlight on what’s gone.
Weirdly, it was basketball and Tom Hanks that made the pandemic real for most people. Hanks’ testing positive and the league’s stoppage in play the same day. It was a unifier, at first, symbolic then to the correct and careful response. I worry what kind of symbol it will be next.