Danilo Gallinari was at the point of first contact when the COVID-19 dominoes began to fall.
The Atlanta Hawks forward was playing for the Oklahoma City Thunder during the 2019-20 season, and he had to spend more than four hours shut inside a locker room the night of March 11, 2020, wondering what was happening. Wondering if someone had tested positive for what at the time was being called the “novel” coronavirus.
Someone had. Fifteen minutes before tipoff, Jazz center Rudy Gobert — who thought he had a cold he could play through — became the first NBA player to test positive for the coronavirus. Four minutes after the news broke, commissioner Adam Silver put the season on pause, making the NBA the continent’s first major professional sports league to shut down. The season was finished in a bubble.
Gobert will be forever synonymous with the moment COVID-19 became a reality in America. Even some of his own teammates, for a time, blamed him for bringing the virus into their midst. But Gallinari doesn’t see it that way.
“Of course that was the first big case and stuff. But you knew it was going to happen sooner or later when you’re standing there knowing how easy it is spread out,” he said Tuesday night in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune following the Jazz’s 110-98 victory over the Hawks.
“Sooner or later, somebody was going to get it,”
Gallinari had been closely following the spread of and the damage caused by the coronavirus for months before Gobert-gate. His native Italy had one of the largest outbreaks in the world at the time. Doctors were having to decide who lives and who dies. And the mother of one of his best friends fell victim to the disease.
Just one day before the game against the Jazz, approximately 24 hours after Gobert playfully and ultimately regrettably touched reporters’ recorders and microphones during a post-shootaround interview, Gallinari had opined that he thought NBA games should be closed to fans.
“I wasn’t predicting anything, or I wasn’t a magician,” he told ESPN. “I was just telling everybody what was going on in Italy was something very possible in the States, too.”
So, no, he’s not putting the blame on Gobert’s broad shoulders.
Two seasons — one held in a bubble — and nearly two years have passed since then, though. Players have returned to the court. Fans have returned to arenas. But something else has returned, too: a surge in coronavirus cases due to the rise of the delta variant.
Deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Utah average in the teens and nearly one out of every five people tested is positive for the virus. Those numbers are similar to those of January, when vaccines were not widely available.
The statistics concern Gallinari, but he also maintains a sliver of optimism.
“I think it is slowly going to go back to normal,” he said.
He said he feels safe playing in the NBA, which requires players and staff to either be vaccinated or to quarantine and be tested daily. Most arenas at minimum require spectators to wear masks. At Vivint Arena, fans are required to show proof of vaccination before entering.
And even though he’s not the one they’re rooting for, and the result wasn’t what the Hawks wanted, Gallinari said he enjoyed hearing Utah’s followers cheer on Gobert and company Tuesday night.
“Utah ... is one of the best places to play basketball, I think,” he said. “The fans are amazing. It’s a basketball city.”
Follow @julie_jag