The freezer-truck drivers had finally hauled off the last of the body bags by early autumn, from a makeshift Covid morgue in the city’s parking lot across the street. And by the time Kyrie Irving turned the corner last Friday evening to the Brooklyn Nets’ riverside practice facility in the neighborhood of Sunset Park, he was let right in.
But Omicron had grinched into town for the holidays, and the NBA’s rigorous testing once again provided early indicators of an unrelenting virus. On the 17th day of December, the league had sent its who’s-who to quarantine: eight Nets a-swabbing, seven Bulls secluding, six Sacramento Kings, five sick Knicks, four Lakers stars, three Boston forwards, two head coaches… and then came a pseudo-pardon for Kyrie.
The basketball superstar-turned-superhero of the anti-vaxxers entered a lab set up by the Nets a few steps from the private players’ garage. Irving returned to Brooklyn to resume practice and play in the NBA two months after being expelled by the franchise for his protest against a New York City vaccine mandate. Executives of the Nets maintained that Irving could be a bailout for his vaccinated co-workers in a list-shattering group of breakthrough cases. “It’s ridiculous,” a former Nets official familiar with how the team’s stars boss around the bosses tells Rolling Stone. “That’s what you sign up for, when you get those players.”
In came the results from Irving’s first of several tests required to return to the court, taken around the same time as the shockwave announcement of his comeback, and irony dunked on irony: “When Ky tested positive, it was meant to be,”One of many Nets front office members to obtain Covid in the past week texts RSFrom isolation. “But also part of me was glad that it shut up the anti-vaxxed hailing him.”
The conspiratorial crusade of Kyrie Irving — taken together with the NBA’s show-must-go-on response to Omicron amidst the frustrations of player life in quarantine — offers a microscope for another winter of our Covidized culture, through which politicians and basketball officials see multiple strains of celebrity chicanery: role-model athletes resisting boosters and enhanced testing, a sports league balancing player safety with profit, and union negotiations dropping dozens more player patients into a petri dish without a lid.
Brad Hoylman is a New York senator who introduced legislation to expand vaccination requirements for visiting performers and players. Rolling Stone that Irving’s reinstatement is “an outrage”This has helped to normalize super-spreader events and vaccine denial. “It makes my blood boil that celebrities and professional athletes are getting a pass. And the rest of us? Our health is endangered, and we’re sick and dying. It’s the ultimate F-you to fans.”
Hoylman went on: “They’re sending a mixed message. They are allowing the vaccine-hesistant players to dominate the news cycle, and they’re perpetuating conspiracy theories and other misunderstandings around vaccines. And at the end of the day, they’re putting lives at risk based on their foot-dragging.”
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver single-handedlyThe March 2020 positive test resulted in the suspension of basketball’s season. That panic is now overshadowing a league which claims 97 percent of its players were partially vaccinated, but has been lacking booster shots. Athletes are not required to have booster shots, as they are for support staff. As Rolling StoneDiscovered last month, outbreaks of the Delta variant already collided with July’s NBA Finals. This week, Omicron is coming for a pro-science league precisely while it prepares for five marquee matchups on Christmas Day — a self-created sports holiday that has become its version of Thanksgiving football, with an estimated $25 to $30 million in advertising revenue already booked through Disney’s ABC and ESPN, according to an analysis by Sportico. The NBA will host its Tuesday Night Game Be informedBasketball Christmas would be cancelled by teams affected by potential outbreaks; the league could simply reschedule to maximize network-television airtime.
Silver agreed to postpone seven matches over six days starting Monday because too many teams could not field the minimum of eight players. More than 80 players have signed up for the NBA protocol to receive a positive or inconclusive result or been in close contact with a confirmed case. A GrowingNumber of Fans think the league office should be moving faster to reschedule, or even reinstitute the NBA’s miraculously Covid-proof bubble of 2020. Players have Publicly and privately called to pause this season until early 2022, though Silver said Tuesday on ESPN that the NBA isn’t planning on it: “We’re having trouble coming up with what the logic would be behind pausing right now.”
According to a person with direct knowledge of Silver’s thinking, the commissioner has confronted this month’s 100-plus new cases — and counting — by trying not to make up precedents on the fly. This high-ranking source speaks silver Rolling StoneHe is aware that he could be even more criticized for inventing parameters to allow for a return of play than for believing that there was a vaccine mandate. “Just as there’s no magic playbook to when you shut down the season, there’s no playbook for when you come back. He has a rulebook right now, and his rulebook says that if you have eight players, you play.”
“That doesn’t mean things won’t change in two days,” the source adds, citing Silver’s adaptive deliberations over an emergency work stoppage. “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It was an easier call when nobody really knew what Covid was and people were dying — but Adam is not going to jeopardize his players for a quick buck.”
According to this source Silver has been closely monitoring the NHL since Monday night’s suspension of the hockey season. The NFL, after negotiations with its players’ union to address its own December spike in cases and rescheduled games, injected a don’t-tread-on-me protocol: Asymptomatic, vaccinated football players will no longer be subject to regular testing. This is a good thing. “targeted” swabbing establishes a largely voluntary policy — players can raise their hands if they’re showing symptoms, but epidemiologists Do not be alarmedA silent spread of breakthrough cases “In terms of whether in essence we can treat this as endemic and people begin to move on and we only test those who are symptomatic and deal with those, we’re not quite there yet,”Silver spoke on ESPN.
The main struggle between NBA owners, union executives, and players has been to get rosters ready for Christmas. Mark Cuban of Dallas Mavericks says that there was no competitive disadvantage to his team’s participation in Covid protocols as of Tuesday night. “The NBA doesn’t care who wins or loses,” Cuban tells Rolling Stone. “The teams certainly care, but I don’t see it as an emphasis that outweighs the health of players…. Leadership is a result of following the science.”
According to an internal memo from league doctors sent to teams on Thursday. It was obtained by RSBoth sides also agreed to increase masking and a TemporaryReintroduction of daily mandatory testing for unboosted but vaccinated playersbetween Dec. 26 and Jan. 8. This annoys basketball players, who have been swabbed more than perhaps any industry’s employees throughout the pandemic, and sources suggested that the union is almost certain to let the policy lapse following the holidays.
“I tend to agree with the NFL now,” the New Orleans Pelicans guard Garrett Temple, who serves on the union’s executive committee and has been involved in emergency negotiations, tells Rolling Stone. “The fact that people don’t have any symptoms but can’t play is kind of tough, especially now that we’re two years removed and we understand a little more about the virus.”
NBA players refused to allow their employer to dictate how they should be taking care of their health. Sources close to players who were not fully vaccinated suggested that franchises had rushed to give stars one dose at pre-season training camp and then left the rest up to the players. “I do think there will be hesitancy, but if we don’t mandate it and show the numbers again, more than you think will get it,”Temple is the founder of the booster shot. “Everyone that is eligible on our team has it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we haven’t had a case yet.”
On Tuesday night, the union reiterated its support for boosters. League sources said that this was confirmed by the union. RSThe number of NBA players who are eligible for booster shots is increasing. They went up from 60 percent one week ago to 63 on Monday and 65 on Tuesday.
“But saying what the right thing to do is and actually convincing everyone to do it are two different things,” says Andy Slavitt, the former advisor to President Biden’s Covid response team, in an interview with RS. Slavitt, who helped fast-track an NBA-tested saliva test for public use in 2020, hopes the league’s role can evolve from preventing panic and providing data to publicizing an Omicron-shielded case study of how boosters and rapid tests can make for a short-term game of Whack-a-Mole.
“If we fully boosted the league like the rest of society, we’d have a lot less to worry about,” Slavitt continued. “Would it be nice if LeBron James was a role model here, like he is in so many other things? It would be great — but you can’t ask people to lead. Then they’re by definition not leaders.”
Chicago Bulls center Nikola Vučević had barely finished reading his email on Nov. 11 — the word Positive was enough — before he started kicking several members of his very Large – and very large – Montenegrin family out of his house. He would be forced to miss a big West Coast road trip for the Bulls, but a Thanksgiving surge of Covid cases was expected to arrive, the team doctors had told him, so he got the Vučević clan packed up for a vacation to Florida without him. He was. SimplyAbout to receive his booster shot.
Alone at his very large condo, the two-time NBA All-Star — all six feet, ten inches and 280 pounds of him — pulled a box of Legos from an ignored drawer and began to build the Batmobile. The Batmobile was built! Star Wars battleship. There is also a bust depicting Darth Vader. Vučević responded to some emails and waited out a breakthrough.
Not long afterHe returned to the floor in late November, the NBA instituted temporary daily testing for players’ return from Thanksgiving gatherings, and Vučević’s Chicago teammates started dropping like flies: A shooting guard on Dec. 1. A fellow Montenegrin two days later. Down went the Bulls’ leading scorer, DeMar DeRozan, and, before a week had passed, seven more teammates had come down with Covid. The NBA postponed short-handed Chicago’s next two games, but Vučević still texted the team group chat about switching to three-on-three. “At least we’ll have herd immunity for the rest of the season,” he Tweet.
“Everybody was more on the kind of joking side,” Vučević tells Rolling Stone. “What else can you do? Most of our guys have the booster and are vaccinated. Nobody had any bad symptoms. It happened to us, and there’s no use complaining about it.”
LeBron had complained to the NBA after a positive post Thanksgiving test temporarily put him into quarantine. It is possible to sayHe was “angered” by the lack of follow-up tests — he received eight within 24 hours — and refusing to answer direct questions about whether he had received a booster shot or would consider one. After the Lakers were able to avoid postponements despite an outbreak last week, one top Bulls official questioned how quickly James’ teammates Russell Westbrook and Malik Monk had hopped from protocols into a private plane to their next game, half-joking to Rolling Stone: “Whatever meds those guys are taking, we want some.”
If it weren’t for all the extra testing that James and Co. had been forced into, the double-vaxxed Denver Nuggets guard Austin Rivers might have been Patient Zero in another outbreak. Rivers was tested positive during three weeks of games in Miami, Orlando and Orlando. “It’s hard to tell guys who are single just to be at home alone,”Rivers are a storyteller Rolling Stone. He was suddenly doing exactly that at his Winter Park mansion, when he felt the body aches, headaches and chills.
Rivers too was about to get boosted. As a family man with his team’s lone case, though, he wasn’t about to scold teammates or friends around the league. At the Nuggets practice area, the smartest people around the globe were encouraging vaccination via CNN. And the anti-vax ignorance in the comments of his Instagram posts wasn’t worth the time. “Trump just got a booster shot,”Rivers states, “and he’s the epitome of that whole group of people who just think in their own way.”
Rivers rolls his eyes when he hears conspiracy theories in the locker room – “fucking wild theories”The fake news about Joe Biden, Big Pharma and the Illuminati in bed with them for millions.
“It’s all for money,”Rivers recalled hearing another player say it.
“How’s it for money? It’s fucking free!”
This week, conversations in team group chats have turned to outbreak theories. “A lot of people just believe they’re trying to get through the Christmas games — that’s a big day for the NBA, a lotta money there — and after that no one knows what’s going to happen,”Rivers are a storyteller RS. Talk of a one-month break is being discussed. Of another bubble, even though that won’t happen. Fans being banned from arenas, and players locked in their hotels on the road. There is talk of standardized testing — perhaps twice daily — and that is something Rivers can get behind.
“That’s why this is getting out of hand: We’re not testing. We don’t even know who has it! I don’t even know if anybody on our team has it right now,”Rivers states. “Even if it’s annoying and guys gotta come back twice a day — and everybody’s gonna do it, because at the end of the day, everybody wants to get paid. Everyone wants to play.”
Irving’s public debut in late September with his decision — First extensively reported by Rolling Stone — to flout New York’s vaccine law by refusing to play in Nets home games, he wasn’t merely staging the most prominent anti-vax protest this side of an Eric Clapton show. He refused to follow the rules of what was described as “a very difficult game.” “a global agenda”To make a profit from entertainers at all costs. Rambling Session on Instagram LiveIrving, after being kicked off by the Nets on Oct. 12, asked: “You telling me what to do with my body? … Entertainment’s like a religion to people.”He said he was supportive of those who are vaccinated as well as those who risk their jobs to resist vaccinations. “all the doctors.”
“Couple that with his bad experiences with medicine — with Western medicine, with NBA medicine — and he’s conflicted about next steps,” says the NBA journalist Brandon Robinson, whose New Jersey upbringing keeps him tight with Irving’s inner circle. “But he stuck to his guns.”
Irving’s world shrank: He gained time with his infant son, Kyrie Jr., while giving up $380,000 in NBA salary for each game in Brooklyn. With his sister, he launched a Shopify shop for hoodies & T-shirts. Even though the Nike deal that cost $11 million per year was not renewed, his latest sneaker went unreleased. “He stopped by the studio, maybe a few bars,” Jerry Green, a high-school friend and owner of New Jersey’s GreenHouse recording studios, tells RS. “He’s very much a principled guy but also gracious with his time when he doesn’t have time — even though he had a little more time.”
But Irving’s influence did not flatten: His jersey remained a top-seller. Conspiracy theorists co-opted his strike for freedom across social media — at least until Facebook deleted their Instagram accounts following A report by Rolling Stone. New York City had to run a major advertisement campaign during the local Nets-game broadcasts. It encouraged vaccinations and discouraged disinformation.
And then there was the STAND WITH KYRIE protest outside Barclays Center, which had been the site of so many peaceful protests following the murder of George Floyd but which, on Oct. 24, turned violent in the name of the anti-vaccine movement’s first basketball totem. During Video footageTaken outside the Nets arena American IdolJimmy Levy is seen joining a crowd of protesters with microphone and American flag, pushing past metal barriers to the entrance. A mob is chanting as Levy attempts evade a security officer. “Let Kyrie play!”Many young people push crowd control gates at workers in the arena as they rush to get to the front doors.
“It does feel kinda like the Jan. 6 thing, only because of the breaking-in-the-barriers part, but one is more political, and this was more about human rights,”Levy acknowledges Rolling Stone. “Trump is geared more toward the right. Kyrie’s more outside of politics — this is more about humans and what they’re putting in their body.”
Irving continues to try his best to get back towards Brooklyn Nets headquarters this week. “it’s been pretty intense with safety protocols,”A team staffer will join him on the court. RS. Irving is putting himself at great risk. None of the more than a dozen sources interviewed for this story suggested that Irving plans to get vaccinated. The Nets did not immediately respond to a detailed list of questions, and Irving’s managers did not respond to multiple voicemails this week. The office of the mayor-elect Eric Adams maintains that the city’s new leader does not expect to reverse the law against home-team vaccine deniers. Covid variants may lead to more local ordinances encouraging safety for performers. A regulation that was unveiled this week in Boston by Eric Adams, Irving’s flat-Earth conspiracy theory, exempts athletes who are not subject to the indoor-arena vaccination mandate.
Fans’ endorsement of Irving’s personal choice in a public-health crisis “is another example of the flawed system of hero-worship in our society,”Hoyman is a New York politician that believes Omicron might encourage the state senate in passing his proposal to close the visiting-entertainer vaccine loophole. Irving should be suspended, Hoyman believes, while the league works to limit his influence. “Athletes and celebrities have a special responsibility because, for better or for worse, the American public emulates them, and it’s unfortunate that some of them don’t take their role terribly seriously, clearly. That’s where I think the NBA and ownership should be stepping in to fix this. Now.”
Matt Sullivan is the author Can’t Knock the Hustle: Inside the Season of Protest, Pandemic and Progress with the Brooklyn Nets’ Superstars of Tomorrow. He was an editor for “The New York Times,” “The Atlantic,” “The Guardian,” “Esquire,”Bleacher Report.