New York City mayor Eric Adams and NBA commissioner Adam Silver have admitted that the rule keeping NBA superstar Kyrie Irving from playing home games for the Brooklyn Nets is unfair.
Unvaccinated Irving, who has been at the center of controversy over his decision not to take vaccination shots and the ensuing debate, is not allowed to play in Nets games at their Barclays Center home because of the vaccine mandate in the city.
Frustratingly for Irving and his team, players from different markets can play in New York City even if they have not been vaccinated.
Previous mayor Bill de Blasio passed the mandate in December 2021. "First of all, I think the rule's unfair," said Adams, who succeeded De Blasio at the turn of the year.
"I believe that we are saying to out-of-town athletes that they can come in and not be vaccinated.
"Yet New York athletes, you have to be vaccinated. And they also do this for entertainers.
"I want people to know that. Entertainers can come here without being vaccinated and perform. I think it's unfair."
Adams joked that a fan of one of the Nets' NBA rivals, the Boston Celtics, might have created the rule.
"I don't know," rued the 61-year-old Democrat. "But I am really, really leery about sending the wrong message.
"Having this city close down again keeps me up at night. And the message we put in place, the rule was put in place.
"To start changing it now, I think it would send mixed messages. So I'm struggling with this, just to be honest with you."
NBA boss Silver echoed Adams' consternation while saying that between 97 and 98 percent of players in the league have been vaccinated.
"This law in New York, the oddity of it to me is that it only applies to home players," Silver told ESPN, adding that he feels the atmosphere in the city has changed and people have been going out more regularly since some mask restrictions were lifted.
"If, ultimately, that rule is about protecting people who are in the arena, it just doesn't quite make sense to me that an away player who is unvaccinated can play in Barclays but the home player can't. To me, that's a reason they should take a look at that ordinance."
Silver said he "could see" Adams scrapping the mandatory vaccination requirement and revealed that the league wanted to make vaccinations a requirement for players, only for the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) to reject the move.
Nets coach Steve Nash is hopeful that the vaccine mandate will change and Irving told reporters on Saturday that he feels "no guilt".
"I'm the only player that has to deal with this in New York City because I play there," he observed. "If I was anywhere else, in another city, then it probably wouldn't be the same circumstances.
"But because I'm there we have Eric Adams, we have the New York mandate, we have things going on that are real-life circumstances that are not just affecting me. So you ask me these questions, I don't feel guilt.
"I'm just living my life as best I can, just like everybody else that missed these last two years. I didn't have a plan in place while all this was going on, didn't know.
"The NBA and the NBPA made it very clear that there would be things that I would be able to do to work around this. And that's off the table.
"So you tell me if I'm just alone out here, or do I have support from everybody else that's dealing with the same thing?"
The spread and impact of Covid appears to be easing across measures shown by public data produced by New York City authorities.
The figures say that there have been more than 360,000 more Covid cases among those who have been unvaccinated since the vaccine program begin, and record more than four-and-a-half times as many deaths among the unvaccinated as those who have had shots since the treatments were made available.