have presented an ambitious plan to state and local officials to reopen Chase Center in San Francisco at 50% capacity for the upcoming NBA season, which owner Joe Lacob believes can be the model for all sports franchises and entertainment venues to safely bring back fans amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lacob said the Warriors are prepared to spend upward of $30 million to test every fan, Warriors employee and player with the most accurate form of COVID-19 testing for each home game or day they come to Chase Center.
"I not only want to get this done and show the world how we can do it now, I'm willing to spend the money to do it," said Lacob, who holds a master's degree in public health from UCLA and built his fortune as a venture capitalist in biotechnology. "This is a serious, serious problem. It cannot go on for multiple years ... because if this were to go on for several years, the NBA is no more.
"You cannot sustain this league with no fans. You can do it for a year. We'll all get by for a year. But suppose we're in this situation next year. Now we're talking some serious, serious financial damage to a lot of people."
Lacob said he and a team of Warriors employees have been working nonstop on this plan, internally called "Operation DubNation," since the NBA shut down March 11.
hinges on the use of rapid PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests or equivalent amplification technologies that can detect traces of the virus' genetic material in nasal or throat swabs within 15 minutes and are far more accurate than rapid antigen tests, which look for a protein that is present on the surface of the virus that is shed.
The NBA used the more accurate PCR tests as it completed its season in Orlando, Florida, but results largely came back overnight as samples were tested in a nearby lab. Major League Baseball also used PCR tests, but results often took more than 24 hours as samples were sent to a lab in Utah. That contributed to the unfortunate situation in Game 6 of the World Series in which Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner was pulled from the game in the eighth inning after his test results came back positive.
Rapid PCR tests or equivalents have only become available in the past few months, with Hollywood studios among the first to benefit from them as the industry resumed production. The NBA also used them this summer and fall, testing thousands of samples, which helped the Warriors in devising their plans.
Three companies -- Mesa Biotech, Visby and CUEHealth -- have earned FDA approval and are ramping up in volume of production, which Lacob said is the key breakthrough enabling the Warriors to meet the volume of tests they will need.
These tests are far more expensive than rapid antigen tests and far less readily available, which led The New York Times to call them "the new velvet rope" when it comes to parties, entertainment events or gatherings for the well-heeled.
But Lacob believes it is essential to use the rapid PCR test because it is close to 99% accurate in detecting the coronavirus in people, even before they become infectious. Experts think that rapid antigen tests, which are what the White House has been using, could miss 30-50% of people who have enough viral load to be infectious.
"The White House used less sensitive tests, meaning that they're going to have more false negatives," said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF who has reviewed the Warriors' plans. "The Warriors are planning on using the most accurate, most sensitive tests we have, and that's a big difference. I don't think anybody else could do anything more than they've done. This is as close to making it as close to perfect a plan as I've seen for anything reopening."
The Warriors' plan also calls for everyone who enters Chase Center to wear a mask and keep social distance, as well as a state-of-the-art air filtration system that has the capability to use 100% outside air or purge the building's air supply and replace it four times in an hour if necessary.
In a memo sent to teams on Wednesday, the NBA set forth guidelines that required testing of fans seated within 30 feet of the court. Fans would be required to undergo and return a negative coronavirus test that is either a PCR or equivalent test, sampled no more than two days before tipoff, or an NBA-approved antigen test or rapid virus amplification test (such as PCR, LAMP or Isothermal) sampled the day of the game.
However, only certain areas of the country are allowing fans to attend sporting events at this time.
California has not approved fans in any capacity since the pandemic began, and San Francisco announced this week that it was rolling back a number of reopenings, including indoor dining and capacity at gyms and movie theaters, with the recent rise in coronavirus cases in the Bay Area and statewide. The Los Angeles Lakers announced Wednesday that games at Staples Center would be held without fans until further notice.
Lacob believes that his plan will eventually be approved by city and state public health officials, once he explains and proves the science behind it.
"Let us prove the concept. Let us use our money, our resources, our seven-eight months of work, our expertise to prove the concept," Lacob said. "That's what I'm trying to get the state, the city and the government to entertain.
"This [rapid PCR] test is orders of magnitude more accurate than the [rapid antigen] test at the [White House] Rose Garden event. This is the best you can do. A lot of people don't even know these tests exist yet, and they are ramping them up.
"By springtime, the rapid PCR tests will be manufactured in amounts nearing 100,000 per day by some of these companies. But I'm trying to show the world, trying to show the sports world in particular, and California, a way to do this. A safe way to have people come to an event and be totally safe walking in that building. The numbers bear it out."
Projected No. 1 overall pick LaMelo Ball conducted an individual workout in front of head coaches and executives for the Golden State Warriors, Charlotte Hornets and Detroit Pistons on Thursday in Southern California, sources told ESPN.
Those three teams own the Nos. 2, 3 and 7 picks, respectively, in next week's NBA draft.
It was the second private workout Ball granted. On Wednesday, he conducted shooting, ballhandling and conditioning drills for the Minnesota Timberwolves, who own the top pick in the draft. Ball had met and interviewed with the Timberwolves, Warriors, Hornets and Chicago Bulls (owners of the No. 4 pick), respectively, over the past few weeks.
https://theathletic.com/2193379/2020/11/12/keith-law-universal-dh-rule-changes-mlb-2020/?source=user_shared_article
I’ve long supported the universal designated hitter because pitchers can’t hit and I am not here to watch players try to do things they can’t do; I go to the ballpark, and I turn on the TV, to watch the best players in the world do amazing things. Pitchers hit a collective .128/.159/.163 in 2019, with 431 sacrifice bunts — the most boring fucking thing that can happen in a baseball game — so they made outs in 86 perspective of their trips to the plate that year. Nobody comes home from a game and raves about the easy outs the pitchers made at the plate.
There are two common arguments against the universal DH, both of them, in my view, fallacious. One is the appeal-to-nature argument that somehow excusing pitchers from hitting means they’re only doing “half” of their jobs, which falsely assumes that the rules of baseball, where all players must both take turns at bat and play a position in the field, were written by God on the third tablet that Moses dropped when he came down from Mount Sinai. Baseball is a game, like football or Catan, with rules made up by humans, and there is nothing sacred about them. They can and should be changed over time, especially since the people playing baseball today are both larger and more skilled than those who played the game in the 1800s, before there was even an American League and it could require four strikes for a strikeout and nine balls for a walk. The average fastball velocity has been creeping up for decades, and we have more pitchers throwing 100+ than ever before.
Remember how pitchers in 2019 made outs in 86 percent of their plate appearances? That’s higher now than it was in the last year before the DH came to the American League, when the figure was 83 percent. Pitchers are getting worse at hitting, probably because pitchers are getting better at pitching. With strikeout rates of full-time hitters increasing, there’s no rational reason to think pitchers, who barely get to spend any time working on hitting as a skill and get far fewer chances to face live pitching in games, will ever get any better as hitters. Being a pitcher is, in and of itself, a full-time, time-consuming job, even on days when you’re not going to the mound, leaving relatively little time to work on improving as hitters — and that’s before we even consider the risk of injury that most teams don’t want to endure.
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