Perfect Timing: The Developing NBA Conundrum in Florida
In life, as in sports, it’s generally best to avoid celebrating too early. It would behoove Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to learn that lesson now, though it may already be too late. The Sunshine State was one of the last states to close down in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and one of the first to reopen, a fact that was celebrated by conservative media figures on TV and in the opinion sections of our finest newspapers. Also celebrating that fact was DeSantis himself, who received Vice President Pence in central Florida at the end of May and took the opportunity to lambast the press for “waxing poetically” about the caseload that the state would see as a result of a premature reopening. In a rant that has aged about as well as the carton of milk I left in my 6th grade locker for the summer, he boasted about having a lower death rate in Florida than the “Acela corridor” of D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City, a preface for words that may haunt him for the rest of his life: “we’ve succeeded”.
The NBA chose Disney World as its site to complete the 2019–20 season partially because they believed that what DeSantis was saying was true: that Florida was in far better shape than much of the rest of the country in its response to the coronavirus. The thought process underlying that logic has proved to be the undoing of entire societies. The nature of the disease is that you’re watching it on a delay — the numbers you see when you open the New York Times homepage or the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard are snapshots of spread from two weeks ago, the incubation period of the virus. To look at those numbers and attempt to extrapolate conclusions is the work of public health experts, not your average citizen or business executive.
Thankfully, Commissioner Adam Silver has retained the services of such an expert. Dr. Vivek Murthy served as Surgeon General during the Obama administration, and has been one of two key advisers to the Board of Governors during the process of attempting to bring the sport back, the other being virologist David Ho. Bringing on Ho and Murthy as consultants has been an overwhelmingly positive development, and paid off in the PR department when health experts roundly praised the NBA’s health and safety protocols for the restart in Orlando. The protocols, which include an initial quarantine and test period, symptom detection smart rings, planned isolation (and more comical rules regarding doubles ping pong and disposable playing cards) are at first glance unimpeachable. Silver has also managed to establish the requisite buy-in from the NBAPA, deftly avoiding a public spat with PA President Chris Paul or their representative, Michele Roberts. On paper, this has been pulled off without a hitch.
The problem is, the virus is not spreading on paper. People are not dying on paper. Cases in Florida are not rapidly spiking on paper. All of these inconvenient circumstances are external to the almost mythical status that the “bubble” has achieved. I have been consistently impressed with Adam Silver’s leadership of the sport during his tenure as Commissioner, but it’s beginning to look like the emperor has no clothes.
First, Florida has seen one of the largest and fastest increases in case numbers of any state in the union. On June 13th, they broke the 1500 new cases barrier for the first time. On June 27th, two days ago, they reported 5,500 new positive tests. This is not just an increase in testing: the positive rate over that timeframe has gone from 4% to over 14%. As the New York Times reported on Sunday, Orlando has not been excluded from the trend: 60% of all cases diagnosed in Orange County have come in the past two weeks. Silver acknowledged the rise in cases and the concern that the “level of concern has increased”, but stopped short of pouring further cold water on the bubble. The players have noticed and, along with concerns over injury risk and acting as a distraction from recent conversations and demonstrations about racism, reasons to withdraw before Wednesday’s deadline abound. Pushing forward with the plan to bring most of the league’s brightest stars into one of the most potent hot zones on the globe may be a recipe for disaster. When it comes down to brass tacks, the bubble is exactly that: a thin membrane, on the other side of which lies serious health complications. Or, as Zach Binney, an epidemiologist at Emory University, described it to CBS News: “[it’s a] mesh hat… if it’s drizzling, maybe your head can stay dry. If it’s pouring, that’s a really hard ask for a mesh hat”. Orlando, in Binney’s view, qualifies as a “full-on rainstorm”.
Then there is the issue of the essential workers at the Disney World campus. The Coalition of Resort Labor Unions, or CRLU, which represents labor at Disney World, staged a protest in Anaheim, California on Saturday, demanding the bare minimum for employees forced to return to work: consistent testing. Early in this process, one of the major concerns Murthy made the owners aware of was the poor optics of using thousands of tests on NBA players while working-class Americans struggled to find a testing site in their area. As the US’s testing capability has ramped up, that concern has faded into the background; nevertheless, the juxtaposition of NBA players, hermetically sealed in a germ-free testing-rich environment,next to minimum wage workers having to return to their families each day, unsure about whether they are carrying the disease, is one that is not just unsavory from a PR perspective, but should be shocking to our conscience. Where are the smart rings for the custodial staff, the bus drivers, the security personnel? Are these people any less worthy of the NBA’s protection? Beyond the principled outrage, simple logic would dictate that protecting the universe of workers that exists outside the players and team staff should be of equal importance. The virus can infiltrate the bubble most easily with those who are actually leaving Disney World on a day-to-day basis, a category that includes hundreds of Disney employees. Why the hell would they not receive COVID tests as they enter and exit the campus? Seriously, if you can think of a reason for the asymmetry, beyond their relative economic stations and celebrity, please let me know. Of the holes in the NBA’s plan to return, this may be the biggest and the most solvable, as all it would take is the NBA and Disney opening their multibillion dollar purse to pay for comprehensive testing and protection for the workers.
Finally, there is no clear and public plan for what circumstances would convince the league leadership to abort. Clearly, there is a scenario in which the surrounding hospitals are at capacity, a micro-outbreak slips beyond the grasp of quarantine procedures, and a slow-building snowball of players dropping out makes it untenable to attempt to continue. What would qualify as having reached that scenario is an open question right now, and that failure to plan for the worst is almost criminally negligent on the league’s part. There should be an NBA-Orlando dashboard that allows everyone from fans to GM’s to see where on the spectrum from “we’re great, this was an excellent idea” to “BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT, WE HAVE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE” the project to bring back the NBA stands at any given moment. Binney proposed an independent panel to rule on the safety of the health protocols; such a panel could be retained to offer periodic grading of the implementation, empowered to recommend that the league shut down if they see fit. For the owners, the profit motive is the highest priority. That is far too strong an incentive to be left unchecked by some sort of commission with a mandate to focus on the public health realities of the restart.
I am a Lakers fan. My team is a slight favorite to win the title, and was playing its best basketball of the season right before a lanky and cantankerous Frenchman threw a wrench in the works. I promise you, I would love nothing more than if the bubble holds and we get to finish out the season. It is becoming clearer every day, however, that there are unanswered questions about this effort, concerns that have been left unaddressed. Chief among these are Florida’s evolution into an epicenter of COVID-19, the labor relations issues that are flaring up just as teams have begun to arrive in Orlando, and the opaque requirements to end this attempt at a resurrection. It is painful to consider the prospect of halting the comeback when we are so close to the first warmups, but if the pandemic (and Governor DeSantis’s response) have taught us anything, it is that there is a real cost to avoid the inconvenient truth.
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