'He's got it': An oral history of the NBA's COVID-19 shutdown -- and how it changed sports forever

NBA COMMISSIONER ADAM SILVER entered the Barclays Center in Brooklyn before the hometown Nets hosted the Detroit Pistons. It was Chinese Cultural Night. The Nets players wore warmup shirts honoring the Lunar New Year, and the starting lineups were announced in Chinese. Traditional Lion Dancers were scattered throughout the arena. On the main concourse, fans could have their names written in custom Chinese calligraphy and enjoy nian gao desserts, also known as Chinese New Year rice cake.

Before the game, Silver stepped into the Diamond Lounge, a private room inside the arena, where a small reception recognizing local Chinese Americans, namely business leaders, was being held. The small space was crowded, with close to 50 attendees.

At the bar, Silver spotted a familiar face, Dr. David Ho, a renowned virologist who had consulted with the NBA in the early 1990s when Magic Johnson announced he had tested positive for HIV. It was Ho's second Nets game at Barclays Center, and he had been personally invited by Nets owner Joe Tsai.

Ho -- a professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and the founding director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center -- immediately recognized Silver. They greeted each other with pleasantries, but very quickly, with COVID-19 dominating the headlines, Silver broached a question.

"What do you think is going to happen?" Silver asked.

It was Jan. 29, 2020, a few weeks after Silver first heard about a virus spreading through China from colleagues in the league offices there, and six days after deciding to close those offices as a precaution.

Ho had first heard of the virus around Christmas 2019 from specialists in China with whom he had worked when he served as an adviser to the Chinese and Hong Kong governments during the SARS outbreak in 2002. During that time, Ho had traveled to China and Hong Kong.

"You would not believe how that region was affected," Ho told ESPN. "You could go to Beijing and there would be no cars on the street."

Ho didn't know what kind of threat COVID-19 posed, but he knew that if the Chinese government was willing to lock down the city of Wuhan -- home to 11 million residents and the site from which the outbreak was said to have begun -- on Jan. 23, then the threat was serious.

Back inside the Diamond Lounge, Ho pointed out something Silver would never forget.

"If you notice," he told Silver, "the restaurants in Chinatown are empty."

Silver paused.

"The Chinese community in the U.S. are quite aware of what's going on in China -- much more than the general public," Ho said. "And the Chinatown restaurants are a reflection of that. People are scared."

The two talked for 15 minutes. Silver had already been concerned about the possibility of filling NBA arenas with nearly 20,000 fans, but the unemotional, matter-of-fact tone from Ho was striking. The next morning, on the same day the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global public health emergency, Silver called Ho and asked whether he would serve as a consultant for the NBA on COVID-19. Ho agreed.

The next day, Jan. 31, the league office sent out a memo to NBA general managers, team physicians and athletic trainers.

Six cases had been identified in America, it noted. It stated that the league was "closely monitoring the spread of a respiratory illness caused by a novel coronavirus." It included links to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and recommendations about practicing good hygiene, including washing hands frequently with soap, avoiding close contact with people who were sick, and not sharing water bottles, towels, glasses or eating utensils.

The subject line: "coronavirus outbreak."

BY EARLY FEBRUARY, Silver began buying extra toilet paper.

"My wife was laughing at me and saying, 'Why are you doing this?'" Silver told ESPN. "I go, 'This is what we're talking about every day at work. It's only toilet paper, but let's get the extra toilet paper.' She told me I was being an alarmist."

On Feb. 15, Silver, David Weiss, then the NBA's senior vice president of player matters, and John DiFiori, the NBA's director of sports medicine, entered a hotel conference room during All-Star Weekend in Chicago. They were there for one of the annual meetings with the NBA Physicians Association. Dr. Lisa Callahan, the Knicks' team doctor and the president of the physicians' association, recalled the league's leadership "really putting COVID-19 on our radar as a potential league issue."

On Feb. 24, 27 and 29, the league sent out additional memos to teams, the last of which outlined the possibility of the virus spreading further. Teams were advised to consult with local infectious disease specialists, prepare to implement temperature checks on players and staff, and consult with local medical centers -- especially for testing -- in case anyone on a team showed symptoms of or was exposed to the virus. In early March, another memo provided "short-term recommendations," including the avoidance of autograph signing and prioritizing fist bumps over high-fives.

On March 2, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and members of his staff attended a concert in Denver the night before facing the Nuggets. They packed inside a small venue.

"Everybody was jammed together, and we were kind of sitting there wondering, is this OK?" Kerr told ESPN. "Are we supposed to be doing this?"

On March 6, the NBA sent another memo, preparing teams for the possibility of playing without fans.

Three days later, after returning from a four-game road trip, then-Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert prepared to speak to reporters after a morning shootaround in Salt Lake City. In advance of a home game against Toronto that night, Gobert sat at a table lined with microphones and recorders while reporters sat at tables several feet away -- aneffort to create social distance and limit potential spread.

After he spoke, Gobert rose from the table and turned to leave, then he paused, turned back to the microphones and playfully touched them and the recorders on the table. It was his way of saying that he wasn't especially concerned about the spread of the virus.

THE NEXT DAY, March 10, members of the Jazz front office and their athletic training staff gathered for a 45-minute meeting about COVID-19 protocols at the practice facility. The meeting was led by the chief medical officer from the University of Utah. "We took it very seriously," Mike Elliott, then the Jazz vice president of health and performance, told ESPN, "and wanted to make sure that we were prepared and that our athletes heard it from a reputable source."

The team flew to Oklahoma City around 8 p.m.ET to face the Thunder the next night in a critical game for playoff seeding. Soon, Jazz players and staff realized that Gobert wasn't feeling well and had begun experiencing symptoms earlier that day -- "a little cold," he would later tell ESPN. After the Jazz landed in Oklahoma City, Dennis Lindsey, then the executive vice president of basketball operations for the Jazz, received a call from Elliot, who told him Gobert wasn't feeling well.

"In my mind," Lindsey said of that call, "it's like, OK, here we go."

The Jazz were staying at the 21c Museum Hotel in downtown Oklahoma City. After checking in, Eric Waters, then the Jazz's head athletic trainer and director of medical services, visited Gobert in his room and found that Gobert was experiencing a fever with chills.

By 10 p.m. ET, the Jazz were on the phone with Dr. Jim Barrett, the Thunder's team doctor. By 11:15 p.m., Barrett arrived at the 21c hotel.

"At the time, there was some question as to whether or not there were any COVID tests in Oklahoma, and if there were, there was an understanding that there weren't many," Elliott said. "So they weren't just going to start passing out tests to us just simply because we were an NBA team, so we needed to have a bona fide reason for someone to administer one of those tests. The strategy was that they would test Rudy for strep throat, for influenza A and B and then administer a PCR-20 test [for 20 human respiratory viruses] to basically kind of rule out any other sort of virus, which would leave us to the point that we would need to mobilize one of those COVID tests."

Around midnight, the team heard back that the tests for influenza and strep throat were negative. By 10 the next morning, Gobert's PCR-20 test came back negative, too. The Jazz shared that information with their doctors and with the league office. Barrett had been in touch with Dr. Linda Salinas, who was from the infectious disease department at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center, and the state Board ofHealth decided Gobert should be tested for COVID-19.

By 9:32 p.m. on March 11, 2020, the NBA announced that a Utah Jazz player -- later identified as Gobert -- had tested positive for COVID-19 and that the league was suspending its season. Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general who had also been consulting with the NBA on the virus, was home in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Alice Chen, and their two children, then ages 3 and 2. The TV was on, and they saw the news of the NBA's decision. Murthy and his wife turned to each other. They didn't say a word.

"Sports have always been an important part of American culture," Murthy told ESPN then. "And when the NBA suspended its season, that was a powerful signal to people that something profound about our way of life is about to change."

For many in America, that announcement marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that would kill more than 1 million Americans -- a figure higher than the American death toll in the Civil War and World War II combined -- and millions more around the world.

"That was a key moment in NBA history," Ho said. "And as you look back, it clearly is a key moment in American history as well."

On the fifth anniversary of that announcement, this is the hour-by-hour story of the key moments that led up to it, and the aftermath, in the words of those who were directly involved.

After leaving the airport in Oklahoma City, the Jazz arrive at the 21c Museum Hotel downtown. Reporters covering the Jazz are notified the team will hold its media availability for the shootaround the following morning, March 11, at the hotel instead of at the arena. Gobert doesn't attend the shootaround, nor does Jazz guard Emmanuel Mudiay. Both are said to be feeling sick.

After Gobert wakes up that morning, he says he's feeling much better and prepares to be tested for COVID-19.

At 10:59 a.m., Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in America, testifies before Congress about the coronavirus outbreak in America and issues a warning. "It is going to get worse," he says.

Meanwhile, at approximately noon, then-Golden State Warriors president Rick Welts enters a meeting with then-San Francisco Mayor London Breed at City Hall.

Two days before, nearby Santa Clara County had banned gatherings of more than 1,000 people, and Warriors officials believed their games would soon be impacted, too. The Warriors are slated to host the Brooklyn Nets at Chase Center the next night, Thursday, March 12.

Welts presses the issue, but Breed doesn't budge: All gatherings of more than 1,000 people in the city were going to be banned. In addition to the Nets game being played without fans, all events at the Chase Center would be canceled through March 21. After the meeting, Welts steps outside City Hall and calls then-Warriors GM Bob Myers to share the news.

The players are getting ready for practice. Bob and I went into the locker room. Bob says, "Rick's got something to tell you." And I say, "Guys, we get to play tomorrow night, but the city's going to make us play in front of no fans." And I can remember it probably was only 20 seconds, but it felt like about two minutes where people were looking at me -- what does that mean? Playing in front of no fans?

And then honestly, the only person to speak up was Stephen Curry, who said, "OK, well, can we have our own playlist?"

At 12:24 p.m., the Jazz list Gobert as questionable with an illness.

At 12:26 p.m.: World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus officially declares COVID-19 a global pandemic. Soon after that announcement, then-National Basketball Players Association executive director Michele Roberts arrives at the NBA's Midtown Manhattan headquarters for a 1 p.m. meeting with the league's leadership, including Silver.

Five days before, Roberts had attended a New York Knicks-Oklahoma City Thunder game at Madison Square Garden. She had talked to then-Thunder power forward Danilo Gallinari, whose concern about Italy -- and the virus -- had only grown. "That's when it occurred to me, this is not something that's just a curiosity," she told ESPN. "This has got to make its way to the U.S. So I knew it was coming at that point, I just knew it was coming, and I was worried to death."

The notion of having these organized games, playing in these 10,000-plus [capacity] arenas with how many people were affected, was ridiculous. So I remember we all said, "OK, this is not debatable, this is not negotiable." So when we walked in, we were prepared for a fight -- and there was no fight.

Adam said, "Absolutely, we completely concur. We're not going to have our people exposed. We're not going to have our fans come out to watch us play and have them be in a position of potentially becoming infected." So it was one of the easiest non-arguments.