Jay Williams, ESPN Analyst & Businessman, Adapts During Coronavirus Era, Discusses NBA Cruise Ship Plan

Like any other small business owner during this coronavirus period, Jay Williams is faced with a ton of uncertainty.

A minority stakeholder in The Cabin, a restaurant and bar in the Alphabet City section of Manhattan’s East Village, Williams and a few of his close friends that own the place decided to shutter the establishment when New York shuttered all non-essential businesses on March 22.

“We decided not to go the DoorDash route,” Williams said over the phone last week, “just because we had a pretty small kitchen and we didn’t think we could scale quick enough to get the max amount of orders out.”

And like many small business owners, Williams and his team are still waiting on his small business loan application for the Paycheck Protection Program. He’d like to keep on as many employees as possible, but New York City rent is expensive and the restaurant isn’t generating any revenue.

“It’s a challenging time,” he said.

Many may know the 38-year-old Williams from his heralded career at Duke, where he helped the Blue Devils win the 2001 national championship and went on to become the 2nd overall pick of the 2002 NBA Draft with the Chicago Bulls. But a horrific 2003 motorcycle accident essentially ended his once-promising career after just one season.

While most people would’ve been completely derailed by such a traumatic event, the New Jersey native slowly reinvented himself, using his outgoing personality and Duke business degree to venture into broadcasting and various entreprenuerial pursuits. He’s a college basketball and NBA analyst for ESPN, including a role on the network’s popular College GameDay roadshow. He also hosts an ESPN+ show called The Boardroom, where he, Kevin Durant and Durant’s agent and business manager Rich Kleiman meet and talk to variuos athletes and business executives.

As the show pivots to focus more on COVID-19, with a needed respite to focus on ESPN’s wildly popular Michael Jordan documentary series The Last Dance, Williams is focusing more on the human side of things.

“I literally have to look at business from a completely different POV,” he said.

Williams recalls watching Mark Cuban talk on CNBC’s Squawk Box show about how businesses are now going to have to operate with a different driving ethos as the economy becomes historically stagnant and volatile.

“This is going to be a time where capitalism will become compassionate,” Williams said, quoting Cuban. Human relationships built more around relatability and empathy is what’s going to connect businesses to their consumers nowadays, he believes.

That extends to the sports world as well. He gave the example of Los Angeles Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey, who’s looking for a massive contract extension to get paid like the elite player he is.

“It’s easy when you’re in that world to say ‘hey look, I want to get paid what my worth is,’” Williams said. “We live in a capitalist society, so 99% of the time that’s what you’d say. But that 1% during a pandemic, it’s so easy to go back in and say that’s what I’m worth. But then when you start looking on the periphery about what’s actually happening in everyday life, you see that everyday people are struggling for jobs and pay cuts.”

As tens of millions of Americans file for unemployment, sports leagues around the world are trying to figure out ways to reopen and start or salvage their respective seasons. Williams was all over ESPN and other sports outlets a few weeks ago to discuss his cruise ship plan, where teams, players and their immediate families would quarantine, isolate themselves and play out the season on the high seas. But for that or any other plan to go anywhere, there needs to be mass and accessible testing available.

“For any league, you have to think about the fact that hypothetically, what that PR nightmare could look like,” Williams said. “To say, ‘okay I’m going to get 1,000 or 10,000 tests’ in order for our elite athletes to play while we have everyday people who are dying because we have inadequate testing, that’s a problem.”

In addition to getting more antibody testing and waiting for cases across the United States to significantly decrease, players also have to decide whether the risks outweigh the rewards.

“My wife and my daughter come first. That’s not even a question,” Williams said, echoing the response of popular WWE superstar Roman Reigns, who skipped the outfit’s flagship WrestleMania weekend earlier this month as an immunocompromised cancer survivor. “And if I were a player making x amount of money, and I got 90% of my salary before the NBA had its reduction, I don’t know if I just wanna leave my family for a month and a half in today’s climate to go play basketball. I would say no to that.”

So leagues and business have to factor in so many things when it comes to reopning their respective industries in safe and sustainable ways, Williams said. It will impact legacies of business owners, sports commissioners like the NBA’s Adam Silver and government officials. But given where we’re at today, Williams is unsure whether the 2019-2020 NBA campaign will ever resume.

“I don’t know where we’ll be in a month, so I definitely don’t wanna say we’re not going to have a season,” he said, “but I think some things would need to drastically move in a different direction for me to say we’re getting to a place where it could be safe.”