Unvaccinated Kyrie Irving’s Return Hits a Snag: He’s Already in the Covid Protocols

The team acquiescing to the idea of a part-time NBA player was the latest twist in one of the world’s most consequential vaccine standoffs. Then came another. 

Just when he thought he was in, they pulled him back out: The Nets said on Saturday that Irving had entered the league’s Covid protocols. 

The suggestion of a positive or inconclusive Covid test for Irving coincides with a turbulent period for sports leagues that suddenly found themselves postponing games and rewriting their pandemic rules in response to scores of athletes testing positive again. 

It also comes with the Nets battling an outbreak that has now benched eight vaccinated players, including stars Kevin Durant and James Harden. The big three that made Brooklyn overwhelming title favorites is temporarily down to zero. 

NBA players can return to the court in sooner than 10 days if they register two consecutive negative tests, but it’s unclear how quickly Irving can be available given his extended break from basketball. If he’s ineligible for the team’s upcoming road trip, the earliest he could see the court would be Jan. 5 or Jan. 12. 

Irving is the biggest star who remains unvaccinated in a league with a 97% vaccination rate—and the only one who works in a city that requires the shot for professional basketball players. 

Brooklyn’s executives decided before the season that Irving appearing in road games only wasn’t a viable strategy, leading to a stalemate in which an NBA title contender was paying one of its best players millions of dollars to stay at home.

“Kyrie has made a personal choice, and we respect his individual right to choose,” Nets general manager Sean Marks said in October. “Currently the choice restricts his ability to be a full-time member of the team, and we will not permit any member of our team to participate with part-time availability.” 

The Nets changed their mind about Irving’s availability with Covid ripping through their locker room in a spike that coincides with a sharp increase in cases across the league and the Omicron variant’s arrival in New York. Brooklyn executives cited a roster that has been depleted by the coronavirus to explain the unexpected backtracking by a team sitting in first place in the Eastern Conference even without Irving. As coach Steve Nash expressed misgivings about pushing the workload of Durant, who nearly leads the league in minutes after rupturing his Achilles’ tendon in 2019, the Nets softened their position. 

“We believe that the addition of Kyrie will not only make us a better team, but allow us to more optimally balance the physical demand on the entire roster,” Marks said. “We look forward to Kyrie’s return to the lineup.” 

They are likely to be waiting even longer now. The Nets have 53 games left in the regular season. Irving is currently eligible to play in 24 of them outside of New York and Canada, but that number will shrink to 21 after the new year. 

The whiplash of Irving’s availability wasn’t the only Covid-related turn of events for the Nets on Saturday. They had managed to win two straight games while extremely shorthanded this week—they fielded eight players in one win, the minimum required by the league—in large part because Durant was sublime. Then he, too, was sidelined. Durant has said that he is vaccinated and was one of the first public figures to share that he had Covid in March 2020. 

Irving, who has declined to comment on his vaccination status, remained mostly silent during his absence with the exception of cryptic messages on social media, including an Instagram video this week that showed him lacing up his sneakers. He was also spotted at high-school and college games in New Jersey and Los Angeles while his NBA team was playing in Brooklyn. 

The league’s Covid rules were significantly more onerous for the tiny minority of unvaccinated players even before the NBA issued a stricter round of guidance this week in response to the uptick of cases: There are nearly 60 players out now, including more than a dozen on the Nets and Knicks alone.

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com