The most famous NBA game that never happened occurred on March 11, 2020. That was the night where Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, both of the Utah Jazz, tested positive for COVID-19, which led to the league getting shut down in the early days of the pandemic in the United States. It happened on the same night that Tom Hanks received a positive COVID test, and played a major role in Americans learning about the gravity of the situation.
In the immediate aftermath, there were a number of reports that Mitchell was furious with Gobert, who tested positive before he did. The thought at the time was that Gobert testing positive first meant that he gave the virus to Mitchell, which led to rumors that the constantly scrutinized relationship between the two might not have been salvageable.
A lot has happened since then, both in their careers and how we understand the way that COVID works. And during a recent appearance on JJ Redick’s podcast, Mitchell admitted that while his understanding of the virus is miles beyond what it was then, he was not especially happy with Gobert for how things went that night.
“It was a weird time, though, cause nobody really knew what it was, right?” Redick said at the 5:29 mark of the above video. “And I was very much like, ‘I just don’t wanna get it. As an athlete, a respiratory illness, I don’t wanna get it.’ When you tested positive, were you scared shitless, or did you kind of feel like, ‘Alright, I’ma be alright, cause I’m young’?”
“I was angry, I’m not gonna lie to you,” Mitchell said. “I would say out of all the media reports that have ever come out about me, Rudy, and the team, that was probably the most accurate. I was mad. I thought, at the time — cause we didn’t know — I thought because Rudy was around doing whatever, that that was the reason I got it. Now, we don’t know, I could’ve given it to him without contact, whatever it was. We don’t know, now looking back at it.”
The two are, of course, no longer teammates, as Utah traded Gobert to the Minnesota Timberwolves and Mitchell to the Cleveland Cavaliers this offseason.
