The COVID Season Was As Good As Sports Get

Last week, Philadelphia 76ers team president Daryl Morey made headlines for claiming that the NBA championship LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers won in 2020 — a.k.a., the Bubble Season — should have an “asterisk” next to it. “Everyone I speak to around the league privately agrees that it doesn’t truly hold up as a genuine championship,” Morey told The Athletic, in an actually pretty terrific oral history about the NBA COVID bubble, five years later. “The champion will forever be marked by an asterisk,” he said.

Suffice it to say, Morey — who probably regrets being a bit too loose with his words — being the one to complain that someone else’s championship is illegitimate is pretty rich. For all his successes as an executive, Morey has famously never won a title. The closest he ever came, falling short in the 2018 Western Conference Finals with the Houston Rockets, resulted in him putting together an absurdly detailed memo to the league office claiming that the referees had stolen the title from him, an all-time Sore Losers Hall of Fame moment. (And his mouth, which gets him in trouble like this constantly, may have once cost the NBA hundreds of millions of dollars of business with China.) Morey is at least self-aware enough to admit that, had his Rockets won the COVID bubble title rather than the Lakers, “I absolutely would have celebrated it as legitimate,” but the aspersions he cast on LeBron and the Lakers seem intentional and, as he notes, are probably widely shared: That title just doesn’t seem as real as other titles.

This is not the case in just the NBA. Until the Dodgers won the World Series last year, their 2020 title, played in front of 10,000 or so socially distanced fans in Arlington, Texas, was also considered a fake title, or at least similarly asterisked. The same is true of the Tampa Bay Lightning in the NHL, Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL, the Alabama college-football team, and the WNBA’s Seattle Storm. They still get to fly their flags forever. But, the thinking goes, they’re not real flags. As we reach the fifth anniversary of many of these championships, as someone who watched and covered all these COVID-season sports feverishly when they happened, I have to tell you, all these fake-title notions are absurd. The teams that won championships during the COVID year not only deserve asterisks next to their title, they deserve special commendation. Their titles were more hard-earned than a “normal” title, not less. Those titles may even mean more than all the others.

First off, it remains amazing — and, all told, still a little irresponsible, five years later — that these games happened at all. Remember, these seasons were played in a pre-vaccine environment in which players had to be tested constantly, and for good reason. These seasons were also constantly in peril. Players were regularly testing positive, which led to teams not being able to fill out their rosters. This is why the NFL had to keep moving games scheduled for Sunday to the middle of the week just so positive players would be outside the testing window. An outbreak involving the St. Louis Cardinals canceled two weeks of their games, and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred reportedly considered wiping them off the schedule entirely. The commissioner of the Big Ten at the time, Kevin Warren, actually did cancel the entire upcoming season in August 2020, only to reverse course once the rest of college football ignored him entirely and kept on playing. Testing became increasingly sparse and inconsistent throughout college sports as their seasons went on, especially college basketball, which is almost certainly the only reason they were able to finish their seasons at all. We are lucky these seasons even happened to allow us to crown a winner in the first place.

And if you thought it was difficult for the executives and league officials trying to complete these seasons (in large part to fulfill television contracts), imagine what it was like for a player. Maybe you got to go out and have a safe socially distanced hang outside with your friends during COVID, but none of these athletes did. The NBA (and WNBA, and NHL) bubbles were the most vivid examples of this, with athletes unable to leave the Disney complex, being tested constantly and being unable to see family members outside the quarantine zone. But the movements of athletes were highly restricted regardless of the sport. Cleveland pitchers Zach Plesac and Mike Clevinger were suspended by MLB and their team for going out to dinner in Chicago after one of Plesac’s starts, with teammates blasting them for “[hurting] us bad. They lied to us.” If you played for a Canadian team, you had to move to Florida; if you played in a state that wouldn’t allow gatherings, you played in front of zero fans. College players, in particular, had their movements strictly controlled. When my beloved Illini lost in the NCAA Tournament, several of their players confessed active relief — they couldn’t wait to see their families and their friends again. In the midst of all this, you had to perform at your physical and emotional peak on television for hundreds of millions of stir-crazy fans … for less money than your actual contracted salary.

Oh, and you did all this in mostly or entirely empty stadiums, where the only fans in the stands were creepy cardboard cutouts.

And here’s the astonishing thing about sports during COVID: The games themselves were often amazing. It turns out when you allow athletes to only practice and play games, to focus 100 percent of their time and energy to training and performing, they are incredible. Some of the most impressive athletic achievements I’ve ever seen happened during the COVID year. Some of the best quarterback numbers ever were put up during the COVID season (led by Aaron Rodgers, ironically enough). MLB teams hit more homers and scored more runs per game during the (truncated, to be fair) 2020 season than any season since. The NBA bubble was particularly spectacular, and it’s not difficult to see why: What else did players have to do inside the Disney resort bubble other than work out and hone their games? I mean, look at this:

The quality of play in the NBA bubble, if you watched it, was transcendent. It may in fact never be as good again, a trade-off that I’m obviously willing to make. Players should get to have lives outside of sports, after all. But it sure was fun to watch when they didn’t.

Considering the disruptions of COVID, the mental stress of playing in quarantine while the outside world seemed to be falling apart, the unconventional and added playoff rounds required to advance (the Dodgers had to play a whole extra series that October), and, of course, the madness of that entire year, the notion that somehow a COVID title should have an asterisk, as Morey argued, has it exactly wrong. Winning a championship that year was harder than doing it at any other time. Those titles, honestly, should probably count twice.