Georges Niang had just finished warm-ups with the rest of this Utah Jazz teammates last Wednesday, March 11th when officials ran onto the floor at Oklahoma City to stop the game before the opening tip.
The next 24-hours essentially shut down the sports world as the NBA suspended their season, college basketball conferences tournaments were cancelled one by one, the NCAA tournament was cancelled, and then essentially every major professional league in the country.
During that time though, the Utah Jazz players were going through a whirlwind of emotions themselves as they were masked, stuck in their locker-room, tested, left to wonder who had been exposed, and ultimately quarantined for two weeks.
This interview doesn’t just focus on the last ten days though, but the better part of the last ten years as Niang has gone from a player that many thought wasn’t a D1 athlete to a one who had one who scored 2,000 points in high school, won a national prep championship, AAU national championship, and Nike EYBL championship.
He was a two-time All-American at Iowa State and finished as the second all-time leading scorer in program history. He bounced around to three NBA franchises and G-League teams before setting in with the Jazz in recent years and has played with the likes of Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Donovan Mitchell among others.
https://soundcloud.com/theupsidepodcast/utah-jazz-forward-george-niang
