DeAndre Jordan was among the multiple Nets who missed out on the Disney bubble because he contracted COVID-19. While Spencer Dinwiddie made it clear publicly he was still trying to play in the bubble after his first positive test, Jordan’s situation was a little less so.
“I was doing all the protocol needed to try to make it back to the bubble and just didn’t have a negative test in the amount of time I needed to have it,” Brooklyn’s veteran big man revealed on a Zoom call Wednesday.
Even after he fully recovered, Jordan doesn’t take COVID-19 lightly. — not that he did before his battle with the illness. He’s still cautious with his day-to-day routine.
“I always took the virus seriously,” Jordan said. “I still do because I know there’s a chance that I could still contract it. Even before, I washed my hands a ton, wasn’t around people, wore my mask all the time — real anal about it. But I still contracted it. Very frustrating. But, I was very lucky that there’s no lasting effects.”
With the NBA not being in the bubble to start the 2020-21 season, the league has teams taking extra precautions each and every day. Jordan outlined what lengths the Nets go to in order to ensure the players and staff are safe:
“Coming to practice is very strange with something we haven’t had to deal with before. But we get to practice, take a test, take another test and you wait in the car until you’re hopefully negative. Then you can go up and, with you mask on, do your individual work and lift and shoot and you go home. And you go home, do the same thing again the next day. I think that we’ve done a great job staying as safe as we possibly can and taking this thing as seriously as it needs to be taken. Hopefully, we can stay safe.”
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