1:13pm: The Mavericks may have had enough players to meet the required minimum tonight, but the league chose to postpone the game in order to continue contact tracing and “to ensure the health and safety of players, coaches and other personnel,” VP of basketball communications Scott Tomlin told Caplan. The contact tracing process is ongoing, per Tim Reynolds of The Associated Press.
11:45am: The NBA is postponing Monday’s game between the Mavericks and Pelicans due to issues related to COVID-19, according to Callie Caplan of The Dallas Morning News. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports (via Twitter) that the Mavs don’t have the required minimum of eight players available.
It’s the fourth game this season that has been postponed, including the third in two days. The Sunday contest between the Heat and Celtics was also postponed, as was Tuesday’s game between the Celtics and Bulls. Before Sunday, all games since December 23 had been played.
Mavericks veterans Josh Richardson, Dorian Finney-Smith and Jalen Brunson were self-isolating as of Friday, and Maxi Kleber joined that list over the weekend. Tim MacMahon of ESPN said on Sunday night (via Twitter) that Dallas wasn’t expected to lose any more players to contact tracing, but it seems that’s no longer the case.
According to Wojnarowski (via Twitter), ongoing contact tracing will leave Dallas with fewer than eight players available tonight, despite the imminent return of Kristaps Porzingis. As MacMahon tweets, that suggests that at least five more Mavericks entered the protocols today.
The Porzingis debut article had a very short shelf life.
was looking forward to this one too!
So they give Dallas a free pass after forcing Houston to play their first two games severely short-handed? Is this not the typical double standard which always seems to against the Rockets? Unbelievable.
Their first game was postponed and they probably didn’t have a lot of sympathy for Harden and his strip club visits.
They should make Vam Gundy do a little performance to fill the time slot. He is very handsome. Maybe a DWTS kind of thing. Him and his brother doing a New Orleans kind of dance. Like an instruction or a tik tok.
bruh they’re now postponing games from left to right. wait till its time for them to either have a bubble system or call it a year