When COVID Chaos Canceled the NBA
We’ve now passed the one-year anniversary of the start of America’s COVID-19 nightmare, and while the vaccine rollout continues to gain steam—suggesting that the summer and beyond will be a stark improvement over what we’ve all just gone through—things have yet to return to anything resembling normal. Thus, in this present environment of continuing lockdowns and virus-prevention protocols, it’s difficult to understand the purpose of The Day Sports Stood Still, which looks back at the tumultuous early months of the pandemic for the NBA and, by extension, sports leagues nationwide. A slight, somber recap that has nothing to say about the well-remembered recent events it depicts, it’s an unnecessary trip back to a 2020 best left in the past.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, HBO’s documentary (premiering March 25) focuses on the outbreak of COVID-19 in the National Basketball Association, which began on March 11, when a game between the Utah Jazz and the Oklahoma City Thunder at the latter’s Chesapeake Energy Arena was halted after Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive. Thunder star Chris Paul, who’s also served as the National Basketball Players Association president since 2013, recalls this incident in exacting detail in The Day Sports Stood Still, his Skype commentary expertly married to footage from that evening’s interrupted contest. As far as placing one back in that very particular moment in time, the sequence gets the job done.
There’s no actual suspense to this footage, however, since anyone with a passing interest in sports remembers that night’s insanity quite vividly. Paul’s own thoughts are of a rather straightforward and mundane variety, as are those of Jazz star Donovan Mitchell, who talks about the confusion of those first few minutes, and the fear that set in once it became clear that Gobert was infected—and, as a result, that he and the rest of his teammates were at risk. Mitchell himself subsequently tested positive, but The Day Sports Stood Still only addresses that through the image of Mitchell’s tweet announcing the news, failing to have him directly discuss it in his own Skype interview for the film. That’s a strange and somewhat glaring omission, as is Fuqua opting to wholly ignore Gobert’s infamous media appearance that night, when he arrogantly—and recklessly—ended his pregame press conference by touching every microphone in front of him.