Clippers guard Lou Williams is back in the NBA bubble and quarantining for 10 days, this after going to an Atlanta strip club to get some chicken wings.
Williams, 33, received an approved absence from the league to attend a family funeral but decided to go to his “favorite restaurant” in Atlanta before returning to Orlando.
NBA on TNT reporter Jared Greenberg, like many, cannot believe Williams did this.
“It’s still a selfish act,” Greenberg said on The DA Show. “I don’t care how good the wings are. I don’t care that he just quote-unquote went for dinner. I don’t care really, truly, that it even was a strip club. I spoke to someone who works in the league, and not even specifically about Lou Williams, but [about] what’s going on with baseball and what’s going on with the NBA and why it seems to be working with the NBA. It’s no guarantee that this whole thing is going to finish. It’s no guarantee that we’re not going to have major issues down the road.
“But one of the things that we’ve set up here being in the bubble – they prefer to call it a campus – is even though the employees at Disney are not being tested at a regular basis and they can come and go, which means it’s not truly a sealed vacuum of what you would consider a bubble, there is still a cadence that is set up with the workers, knowing how to avoid people who are working here with the NBA either as players or as media or as staff members. There is a protocol that’s set up. There’s a routine that goes on on a daily basis. It’s taken very, very seriously. That’s why there were no positive tests by the players the last time they released the numbers. What Lou Williams did is totally put this thing in jeopardy.”
Kendrick Perkins, among others, have taken Williams to task for potentially ruining the NBA’s restart plan.
“If you need to get wings in 2020 during a global pandemic where millions of people have lost their jobs but you still have the opportunity to make millions of dollars by going down to Orlando to play basketball and possibly win a championship because your team is that good, do you think you can get them Uber Eats?” Greenberg asked. “Or do you think Lou Williams, who has a menu item named after him, knows somebody at that strip club that will personally deliver those wings [to him]? By going out into a large group of people who are untested – and only because social media captured it did you have to own it – put this whole thing in jeopardy.
“As we’ve learned – and we’re still learning a lot – it only takes one person in a community to change the course of public health,” Greenberg continued. “If Lou Williams didn’t get caught, he doesn’t tell anybody, and then he comes back into this bubble. . . . You can test positive a week, two weeks, maybe three weeks after contracting the virus, and he wouldn’t have known it. This is serious business. There is a thousand people on this campus who get tested every day – and not just his teammates, who are trying to compete for a championship . . . but everybody here, we’re taking this seriously. If you’re going for a funeral, go for a funeral; get the wings delivered to your house somehow, someway.”
While some people find the situation comical, Greenberg does not. Whether Williams went to a strip club or a steak house, he still scoffed at the community buy-in that the league is demanding from its players.
“I think us making a joke of it is ridiculous,” Greenberg said. “This whole thing, something could happen and maybe we don’t finish the season. This is, again, not a perfect scenario. But by wearing masks, by washing our hands, by socially distancing, by getting tested and having those test results turned around in less than 24 hours on a daily basis for everyone – we’re showing the American government, the American people, we’re showing the world – how you reduce risk and you reduce cases.
“The bottom line is so far so good, and it’s happening because of the buy-in. We’re taking the steps that we’ve heard for months now from the CDC, from public health officials, from the experts the NBA has hired, and it’s worked pretty well. If we’re seeing people not wear masks or we’re seeing people skip their tests – as Paul Millsap and Kristaps Porzingis have – if they don’t get held accountable, then there’s no way that this works. There has to be a plan in place, and that plan must be followed.”