On Thursday, the 76ers found out Seth Curry tested positive for COVID-19 while in the middle of a game against the Brooklyn Nets.
Curry was ruled out beforehand with an ankle injury, so he hadn’t seen the floor. But still, he was around teammates and even sat next to 76ers star Joel Embiid on the bench during the game.
Fast forward to Saturday and, somehow, the 76ers are still set to play their game against the Denver Nuggets as scheduled, according to a report from ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
The Sixers will have nine eligible players active for Saturday’s game. The NBA’s rules for this season require eight. Among those nine is Embiid, who was in close contact with Curry.
The Sixers are expected to have nine eligible players today, including three cleared from protocol: Joel Embiid, Danny Green and Paul Reed, sources tell ESPN. https://t.co/4TBl3xJXaq
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 9, 2021
It wasn’t just Curry, either. The Sixers also had one team staff member test positive for COVID on Friday, per Wojnarowski and Ramona Shelburne.
Playing this game doesn’t feel like the greatest idea. In fact, it feels borderline irresponsible — especially after looking at what the NBA accomplished in its bubble over the summer.
The league was the first to jump into the fray and take COVID-19 as seriously as possible. Now, it seems, they’re opting to just plow right through it one way or another as other sports have done over the last year.
The NBA has postponed one game so far this year, but it sure feels like this should have been the second — and that flexibility needs to be built into the schedule to make these sorts of calls. We all saw Curry sitting there next to Embiid, and that was just *two* days ago. Any notion that he’s definitively “cleared” at this point defies what we know about how the virus spreads.
Surely the NBA and its players have tried to come up with a system that allows games to be played while keeping players safe, but this instance shows that the calculation favors fitting games in rather than taking obvious precautions.
That’s an incredibly dangerous strategy for everyone involved.