Lurching toward Christmas: depleted Nets, after postponing third straight game, set to play Lakers tomorrow in valuable TV broadcast

A 12/22/21 announcement from the Brooklyn Nets, BROOKLYN NETS VS. PORTLAND TRAIL BLAZERS GAME POSTPONED:

The NBA has announced that tomorrow’s Brooklyn Nets game at Portland Trail Blazers has been postponed due to the number of players in Health & Safety Protocols.

The Dec. 23, 2021 game against the Trail Blazers will be rescheduled and we are working with the NBA to confirm a new date.

That would be the third straight game, though NetsDaily yesterday summarized the situation as Good News, Bad News: Nets plan to play on Christmas but with 10 players in protocols. 

(Those "protocols" mean either a positive or inconclusive test, or, if unvaccinated, exposure to someone positive--and requires two negative COVID tests at least a day apart to exit. The AP notes that the league and players are discussing "whether to change the current protocols about returning to play after a positive test — something that typically has taken 10 days or more in most cases." Most who've tested positive have mild or no symptoms.)

That's good news maybe for fans, but really for the bosses and the league, which want/need the revenue from a marquee matchup--at least on paper--between Kevin Durant's Nets and LeBron James's Los Angeles Lakers.

Except KD won't be playing, and four of the nine or ten players available are totally new.

This actually has
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The NBA, and the Nets

It's a business, and the league is punting.

Good on @Baxter & Woj for honest reporting—despite obvious financial interest from their employer that broadcasts the games—on the same frustrations I’ve been hearing: Top teams aren’t testing asymptomatic cases in their midst, and execs know the financial motivations involved: https://t.co/Hh5CKEXUV6 pic.twitter.com/Te3eJm9aMM

— Matt Sullivan (@sullduggery) December 23, 2021

Writing for Rolling Stone, The NBA’s War on Omicron Christmas: Behind Closed Doors with Kyrie Irving and the Anti-Swabber Superstars, Sullivan--author of Can't Knock the Hustle--took an acid look at the Nets:

Two months after banishing him in response to his boycott of a New York City vaccine mandate for local entertainers, the franchise welcomed back Irving to play on the road and practice in Brooklyn. Nets executives maintained that the unvaccinated point guard, of all people, could bail out his vaccinated colleagues from a roster-shattering cluster of breakthrough cases. “It’s ridiculous,” a former Nets official familiar with how the team’s stars boss around the bosses tells Rolling Stone. “That’s what you sign up for, when you get those players.”

In came the results from Irving’s first of several tests required to return to the court, taken around the same time as the shockwave announcement of his comeback, and irony dunked on irony: “When Ky tested positive, it was meant to be,” one of several members of the Nets front office to get Covid over the past week texts RS from isolation. “But also part of me was glad that it shut up the anti-vaxxed hailing him.”

Sullivan quoted state Sen. Brad Hoylman, who sponsored legislation that would require visiting players/performers to conform to the vaccine requirement that keeps hometown player Irving from home game, called Irving's reinstatement “an outrage.” 

The importance of Chri$tma$

Though some players want the NBA to pause the season, they're not about to, at least not until getting over the Christmas hump.

The NBA's Apocalyptic Season, Colin McGowan wrote 12/22/21 for RealGM:

Because the NBA is not for us. It is for the plutocrats who own the teams and the league’s corporate partners and, to a lesser extent, the players. Our interest is, if not taken for granted, then highly abstracted into ratings and demographic statistics. The way Adam Silver understands it, it is not entirely or even mostly real.