When the novel coronavirus outbreak struck the NBA, several players who tested positive for the illness had recently played the Utah Jazz — which featured the first two players to test positive for COVID-19, Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell.
But the Brooklyn Nets hadn’t seen the Jazz since January. Yet they’ve had more confirmed cases than anyone (four), one of which is star forward Kevin Durant.
Durant is one of the three players who had not displayed symptoms of COVID-19 upon the team’s announcement about the four players. This only made the news more shocking for Garrett Temple and other Nets teammates when Durant informed them, as the wing expressed during his recent appearance on The Athletic’s “Tampering” podcast:
When we found out about ‘K’ (Durant), when he told us, it was like, ‘Wow, really?’ Because flying back as a team doing different things, none of us had been around (people who were known to have been infected). …We were thinking, ‘None of us probably have it.’ It’s just a nice precaution to take because we were in L.A. and guys went to dinner or maybe went out and stuff like that. So when we found out that KD had it, it was kind of shocking honestly, because he wasn’t showing any symptoms.
When Temple found out, he wasn’t fearful for Durant. At that stage, young, athletic people seemed to be at low risk. Celtics guard Marcus Smart has since recovered from the illness. Reports also indicated Mitchell, Gobert and Detroit’s Christian Wood have, as well.
But Temple still felt for his teammate:
I was sad for him, because it’s just something that you don’s want to have, because we don’t really know anything about it. That was the main thing. I was surprised and I wanted to make sure he knew we had his back and whatever he needed. … As a team, we have a group chat and everybody told him they were thinking about him and things of that nature, as well as the other guys.
Temple also added he and his teammates ‘still don’t know how [Durant’s] name came out.’