Nicolas Batum has bottles. In the NBA for more than a decade, the Los Angeles Clippers player does not let himself be surprised by much that the great North American basketball league has to offer. However, the captain of the French basketball team confides his perplexity in the face of the course of the season: “It’s been fourteen years that I evolve in the NBA, and, for the first time, I have difficulty in situating myself there. This season is so weird! ”
While the fifth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc in the championship – and in the United States -, the Frenchman is playing this weekend with the Clippers two matches of the “NBA Primetime Games”, matches at adapted times for Europe set up by the League: against Memphis, Saturday January 8, and Atlanta, Sunday 9 (9:30 p.m. on BeIN Sports 1, both).
First competition to be interrupted, at the beginning of March 2020, after the French pivot Rudy Gobert (Utah Jazz) tested positive for Covid-19, the NBA has since adapted its regulations to the pandemic, and continues its course no matter what cost. For gamers, everyday life in the middle of the fifth wave looks like the movie One endless day – but without Bill Murray or the groundhog. ” VSEvery day, we receive notifications saying that one, two or three players or coaches are positive; and that teams end up with seven or eight players ”, testifies Nicolas Batum, interviewed during the week by The world. And the tests follow the tests, despite an overwhelming majority of vaccinated players.
“It’s a little weird in terms of the game”
Now the whole league is concerned. Last “resistant”, Utah Jazz joined the twenty-nine other teams on Wednesday: they all have since then at least one player in “Covid protocol”. After being his body defending the “patient zero” of world sport, Rudy Gobert was once again infected with the galloping variant Omicron, and was forced into solitary confinement.
Nicolas Batum anticipated the call, in a way. “I contracted the Covid a little earlier than everyone else, at the end of November, and it kept me away for a good three weeks”, relates the captain of the Blues, who was hardly lucky: barely returned, a big sprained ankle put him on the sidelines – he has gradually returned to his best level since then.
The Clippers, and their workforce decimated by injuries and cases of contamination by SARS-CoV-2, embody this strange NBA season, where indecision prevails. “It’s a bad time to go, observes the handyman of the second franchise of Los Angeles (with the Lakers). It’s not obvious, but the NBA is trying to find solutions to keep the game going, so that people can continue to enjoy it, on location or on TV. “ In addition to regularly rewinding its health regulations – depending on the evolution of knowledge about the pandemic – the league has relaxed its rules to allow the replacement of isolated players.
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