Wizards center Daniel Gafford won’t be available for Monday’s game against Detroit, but he’s listed as out due to return to competition reconditioning, meaning he has exited the NBA’s health and safety protocols, tweets Chase Hughes of NBC Sports Washington.
That news is notable because Gafford had been the lone player remaining in the league’s COVID-19 protocols after Pelicans big man Willy Hernangomez was cleared last week. Now that Gafford has been cleared too, none of the 30 teams have a single player in the protocols.
It’s a stark contrast to where the league was at just six weeks ago. At the end of December and the start of January, there were well over 100 players in the health and safety protocols. Most teams needed to sign multiple replacements to 10-day contracts to withstand COVID-19 outbreaks, and even then, several games had to be postponed.
Of course, just because there are no players in the protocols right now doesn’t mean there won’t be more players affected going forward. It’s safe to assume individuals will continue to enter the protocols here and there, and there’s no guarantee there won’t be more team-wide outbreaks before the end of the season. But we’re hopeful that the worst of those outbreaks are behind us for the 2021/22 campaign.
We set up a tracker in December to keep tabs on which players were entering and exiting the health and safety protocols, and we’ve updated it daily since then. However, we’re putting that tracker on ice for now and will only resume updating it if the number of players affected starts climbing rapidly again at some point in the coming days, weeks, or months.
crazy! you mean to tell me not one of the hundreds of NBA players travelling on planes, sweating all over each other, walking through airports, sleeping in hotels, constantly on the road currently has covid?? seems unlikely
Well this is a jinx if I ever read one lol
Great news. Hopefully we can leave the micromanaging and nitpicking aside and focus on the fact that things are looking a lot better than they did a year ago and a month ago.
Seeing as how, in NYC, you can walk into plenty establishments without a mask or being asked to show proof of vaccination shows both municipalities & biz are growing weary..er of the unsustainable rules.
Betting 2023 will look a lot like 2018.
Look at that. A 97% vaccination rate in a population effectively gets infection rates down to zero.