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The Jazz found themselves confined to the visitor’s locker room in Oklahoma after Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 before the NBA subsequently suspended the season. It was not a particularly enjoyable situation to be in, but they were able to make the best of it with the help of the bottles of win Chris Paul sent their way.
It’s hard to believe we’re closing in on the fifth anniversary of The Day Sports Stood Still, the 24-hour period that saw basically every major sporting organization based in the United States take a break thanks to a domino effect sparked by the NBA’s decision to postpone every game on the schedule due to the growing pandemic that could no longer be ignored.
In hindsight, it was only a matter of time until that happened, but the league got a head start courtesy of Rudy Gobert, who attempted to downplay the growing threat of COVID-19 by going out of his way to touch a bunch of microphones at the end of a press conference just a few days before he came the first NBA player to test positive for the illness.
ESPN recently revisited the series of events that transpired on the fateful night that saw the NBA cancel the game between the Jazz and the Thunder in Oklahoma City with a fantastic oral history chronicling the frenetic series of events that ultimately led to Adam Silver pulling the plug on the season that eventually resumed in The Bubble in Orlando a few months later.
The Jazz were understandably told to remain in the locker room in the wake of Gobert’s diagnosis so nurses could give them tests in order to determine if it had spread to the rest of the team, and they were cooped up there for around five hours as a sense of unease lingered in the air.
As Donovan Mitchell recalled, they were eventually able to take advantage of the bottles of wine Chris Paul (who was playing for the Thunder at the time) sent their way, saying:
“Chris sent us a bunch of bottles of wine. I want to say maybe two or three [hours after they went to the locker room]. The arena was clear.
You could walk around the arena, and it was just us. So we ended up drinking wine, and we’re just drunk. We’re just like, there’s nothing else we can do. We’re here.”
Royce O’Neale also gave Paul props for the much-needed distraction, adding, “That might be what saved everybody because being in that locker room for five, six hours, I don’t know what we were going to do. There’s only so much food, snacks and water and Gatorade we can drink.”
What a guy.