The NBA stunned the sporting world on Wednesday night when the league announced that it was suspending its season indefinitely following a player on the Utah Jazz testing positive for coronavirus.
According to a report from The Athletic’s Shams Charania, that player is Rudy Gobert, who made the unfortunate joke of rubbing his hands all over reporters’ microphones just a few days ago as a way to poke fun at the panic over the disease.
Gobert testing positive is scary for the league, but what’s also scary is that the Jazz are coming off a road trip that saw them visit cities up and down the Eastern seaboard. I’m almost certain they’re monitoring players and staff on all those teams closely — as well as Gobert’s own teammates and support staff.
What’s even scarier than all that, however, is that it might be irrelevant how many cities Gobert has visited. As this chart from StatMuse shows us, there is so much frequent travel in the NBA that even just one game — Jazz vs. Raptors, six days ago — could connect all 30 teams in the league.
In less than a week.
All 30 NBA teams can be connected in just the last 5 days.
The NBA made the right decision to suspend this season. pic.twitter.com/jUy3X5zwTj
— StatMuse (@statmuse) March 12, 2020
The NBA is obviously not a normal business, but this chart can show you how quickly many different people can be connected, all over the country (and world).
Important note: This chart is NOT saying that the disease definitively traveled to all these teams. We have no idea if anyone contracted anything, and if they did, we probably could not connect it back to any single person as these players are traveling and coming into contact with tons of people every week.
The point is — all these teams play each other in rapid succession, and it’s easy to see how something like this could spread across an entire league. The NBA made the right decision in suspending the league.
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