The Jazz’s game against the Washington Wizards scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed due to COVID-19 protocols, according to an official release from the NBA Tuesday evening.
The league announced that the Wizards would not have the requisite eight players to begin play on Wednesday, leading to the cancellation. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that “more than two” of their players are in the league’s contact tracing protocols.
The game is the NBA’s fifth that has been postponed in the last four days, along with an earlier postponement in the season’s opening week. On Tuesday, the league’s Board of Governors met to introduce stricter COVID protocols in response to the outbreak among teams.
Joe Ingles spoke about the possibility of the game being postponed at Tuesday morning shootaround, before the Jazz played the Cleveland Cavaliers.
“I mean, you can say it’s kind of frustrating or whatever, but it is what it is — it’s the world we live in right now. It’s a lot of unknowns,” Ingles said. “We spoke earlier in the year, in preseason, about there’s going to be a lot of stuff this year that we’re just doing on the fly or we’re getting a text an hour before something ... we’ll take it as it comes, because we really can’t do anything else, to be honest.”
The Jazz will now fly home to Salt Lake City right after Tuesday’s contest against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
