Mark Bartelstein first heard about the novel coronavirus when news of it started to trickle out of China, in late December and early January. He had four clients playing in the Chinese Basketball League. He began to wonder what that meant. How dangerous was it going to be?
He has clients in Europe, too, and he watched as what is now a global pandemic spread from one country to another. He saw the cases rise in Spain and Italy and France.
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“At that point because we were so connected to what was happening over there and understanding how bad it was getting in Europe,” he said, “that’s when you get the sense, OK, this is coming here and probably in the States.”
Few people in basketball have been able to observe the international development of COVID-19 with a more personal viewpoint than Bartelstein. The high-profile agent counts three Knicks among the many NBA players and several stars he represents, and the agency he founded, Priority Sports, has an even wider reach. With players on multiple continents, he has perspective on how the virus that originated in Wuhan, China, turned into a worldwide pandemic and how it affected basketball as it spread.
As the Chinese Basketball Association shut down in January, Bartelstein hurried to get his clients out of the country. He talked to their teams, getting their permission for players to leave, and put together the logistics to get them out.
“We had to get guys home and we had to move quickly because travel was being shut down,” he said. “There was a lot happening in a very short time.”
The first positive case in Italy came on Jan. 31, and the first death occurred on Feb. 22. By the end of the month, Lombardy became a hot zone for the virus and Northern Italy was the first part of the country to be locked down. Italy quickly turned into Europe’s epicenter for the illness.
France and Spain soon started to deal with their own pile-up of cases. With clients in those countries, Bartelstein started discussing the coronavirus with his NBA clients, trying to educate them on the illness.
It was a tricky time for the NBA. While the league sent out a memo on March 2 telling players to avoid handshakes and prioritize fist bumps in fan interactions, it continued to hold games in large arenas and carry on normally.
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“I was expecting the season to get postponed,” Bartelstein said. “After seeing what was going on in Europe, I knew it was just a matter of time that it was going to happen in the NBA. We were preparing a couple of weeks beforehand.”
On March 11, a Thunder-Jazz game was stopped just before tip-off in Oklahoma City when news broke that Jazz center Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the coronavirus. Soon, his teammate, Donovan Mitchell would test positive too. NBA commissioner Adam Silver suspended the season that night, starting a cascade of league stoppages and postponements across the United States and in Europe.
Since then, sports has been dormant across the world.
“I want to make sure that I give Adam Silver props,” Bartelstein said. “He was out in front of this thing and trying to do the right thing by protecting the players and protecting the community by making the decision he made. Which, once again, showed the leadership that the NBA has. A setting the tone of what’s right and what leadership is all about.”
The NBA has seen several high-profile players test positive as teams have procured tests, using public and private stockpiles. Kevin Durant was among four Nets players to do so. Gobert and Mitchell were the first. Celtics guard Marcus Smart has since recovered. The Lakers had two players test positive, though both were asymptomatic.
“The teams have all been great with that,” Bartelstein said. “All the teams got the players tested that need to be tested. We’ve had a couple of players that tested positive, but other than that everyone is in a good place.”
The last few weeks have been mostly filled with information gathering and waiting. Significant portions of America have been under some form of stay-at-home orders for weeks as government leaders and health officials wait to see if the country can slow the spread of cases and deaths. New York City and New Jersey have been hit hardest so far.
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Bartelstein, like everyone else, has been trying to get as much intel as possible.
“I think this is all uncharted territory,” he said. “I think everyone is doing the right thing, which is let’s follow the direction from the health professionals how to best mitigate the problem and let’s see how good of a job that does do in slowing the virus down … Based on how that goes I think decisions will be made. Anyone that says that they know what’s going to happen or what the next step is I think is foolish. There’s so much that we learn every single day. None of us really know.”
The big question for the NBA now is whether it will be able to restart its 2019-20 season. Silver said Monday night that the league won’t be in a position to consider resuming the season until May 1. The U.S. government has extended social distancing guidelines until April 30.
The Chinese Basketball Association — the first professional basketball league to stop — had planned to restart later this month but is now delayed until at least May, according to an ESPN report. South Korea’s basketball league was canceled late last month, despite the country’s perception as a world leader for its response to the coronavirus.
Bartelstein believes that the NBA season can still restart and that if it does the league will be able to provide players an appropriate amount of time to get back in shape and for training camp. That could take weeks.
The agent trusts that Silver will do the right thing in finding a way back for the league, too.
“I think we just don’t know what’s going to happen,” Bartelstein said. “I think the prudent thing for everybody to do right now is just keep gathering information and see what happens and then when the time comes and player decisions can be made because we have all the information to make the right decision I’m sure it’ll be made. Right now there’s just no way to predict because we’re learning so much every single day. That information at the end of the day will dictate what direction we end up going.”
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He added: “I think (the NBA has) literally got hundreds of different models. All those models are based on what happens here, which we just don’t know. Depending on different scenarios, different models will play out. But we’ve got to get through those scenarios to figure out which models will work best.”
(Photo: Jeenah Moon / Getty Images)
