Raptors Ready to 'Fall in Line' With Whatever New COVID Protocols Are Coming

The Toronto Raptors are well accustomed to dealing with COVID protocols by now and are readying themselves for whatever comes next

Aaron Rose | Dec 17, 2021

Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports

This suck.

It sucks to have fallen back into increasing COVID cases, more restrictive measures, and growing concern that things are rapidly getting out of hand. It sucks that there are people who have been waiting all year to see Steph Curry play in Toronto and their one chance to see the all-world scorer this season has vanished, stripped from them by new capacity restrictions that have forced MLSE to refund tickets for 50% of fans. It sucks that one of the league’s best home-court advantages has vanished, turning the once electric Scotiabank Arena into a shell of what it used to be.

It all sucks.

“I’m like anybody, everybody’s got a moment of balancing out being disappointed because you want things to stay the way they are or improve and they’re just not right now,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said Thursday.

By now, the Raptors are well accustomed to adapting on the fly. As Canada’s only NBA team, they’ve been forced to deal with more restrictive measures compared to the rest of the league. It's why Precious Achiuwa was forced into COVID protocols as a close contact despite being fully vaccinated. That was an Ontario decision, not an NBA decision.

Behind the scenes, the Raptors have typically been a week or so ahead of the rest of the league in terms of locking things down, masking up, and increasing testing, Nurse said. But that hasn’t made things much easier.

Last season the COVID-19 protocols made time in the gym harder to come by. For Svi Mykhailiuk, the measures were to blame his lackluster three-point shooting season, he said during his introductory press conference. His rhythm was thrown off, unable to work his way out of his funk, get into the gym, and tweak whatever needed to be tweaked.

Now, some of those measures may be coming back. The NBA and NBPA are reportedly discussing bringing in stricter measures to deal with COVID-19 issues throughout the league. As of Thursday afternoon, there were 36 players actively in Health & Safety protocols, accounting for 7.2% of the entire league, according to Tim Reynolds.

“It's probably unrealistic to not expect some type of change, but [we've] just got to take it in stride,” Fred VanVleet said. “I think it's a little bittersweet, we were lucky to have fans back, we were lucky to kind of go back to the way things were, but obviously we've got to put the health and safety first. So we'll fall in line with whatever that means.”

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