Warrior’s Defensive Ace- Draymond Green voiced his agitation on Twitter, Wednesday night, about the cancellation of games this season.
How do you continue to cancel games when you’ve implemented rules to prevent this from happening? Is that not a competitive advantage for other teams? The guys we didn’t have due to the protocol list played no role in Tuesdays loss? Pick a side but don’t straddle the fence.
— Draymond Green (@Money23Green) December 30, 2021
With an unfortunate combination of injuries and virus outbreak in the Nuggets organisation, Denver was unable to meet the league-minimum eight players to participate in Thursday’s game against the number 1 seed in the west, The Golden State Warriors. Denver would have also been missing their Head Coach Michael Malone.
The re-scheduling of games has had a considerable effect on player performance. Hypothetically, where one team would have equal spacing between the scheduling of games, another team would be forced to have a back-to-back game. In the words of Draymond in the case for GSW/Nuggets late-notice postponement, “An advantage for the Nuggets”.
However, the Head Coach of the warrior’s organisation, Steve Kerr has brought out a sympathetic view in cognizance of the detrimental effects of the pandemic,
“this is a really difficult situation for the league to navigate. Nothing is fair about it for anybody. Some teams are on the short end of it, like we were the other night. We’re just trying to survive.”
Kerr furthered his sentiment,
The league’s just trying to keep things rolling as we get through this variant of COVID. Hopefully within the next few weeks, we get back to this semi-normalcy where we were at the beginning of the year.”
Kerr’s words attest to the current status of the league, as this is the 11th game this season the NBA has postponed; affecting 15 of the 30 teams in the league. The Hawks have the highest number of players in the health and safety protocols at a whopping twelve. Boston Celtics at six including two-time all-star Jayson Tatum.
GSW awaits their next game in Utah.
