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Williams revealed that Yale was his second option, not Harvard, but his decision to attend Tennessee raised concerns within his family, given the academic opportunities he was passing up. He acknowledged that as a young black male in society, opting for a non-Ivy League school wasn’t the conventional choice for academic pursuits. “My mom wasn’t necessarily happy with that, being that I’m a black male in society and I had a chance to go to an Ivy League. It doesn’t necessarily sit well when you say you’re going to Tennessee for academics, but also to play sports,” Williams explained during a conversation with Emily Austin on The Hoop Chat.
As if that weren’t enough to sustain Podoloff’s legacy and memory on Silver’s watch, he was — you should excuse the nearly discarded Pollyanna expression — living proof of the American Dream. Fleeing murderous pogroms in Russia, Podoloff’s Jewish family emigrated to New Haven, Conn. — where Podoloff, in his early teens, learned English and in 1915 earned his law degree from Yale. Along the way to establishing the NBA, he served as commissioner of the American Hockey League, thus a chosen leader of two sports at one time while also serving as a distinguished attorney.
Nets owner Joseph Tsai had already reached his limit, multiple sources told The Athletic, after years of injuries, off-court embarrassments and playoff failures were followed by threats leaked by Irving and Durant during Brooklyn’s contract negotiations with Irving. Tsai, 58, co-founder of Alibaba Group, China’s largest commerce retailer, was born in Taiwan, went to high school in New Jersey, has two degrees and four varsity letters (lacrosse) from Yale and is worth $9 billion, according to Forbes.
Jeff Van Gundy blew his shot with Jodie Foster so badly that he failed to even make an impression. During a recent appearance on “The Dave Pasch Podcast,” Van Gundy reminisced about the time when he and Foster were freshmen at Yale. The former Knicks head coach recalled that during his first year in New Haven, he and 11 other males in his freshman dorm pledged $100 each to a pot, and whoever got the first date with Foster would take home $1,200.
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He loved basketball, both playing and watching his hometown Sonics. He took the craft seriously but he spent most of his free time studying for his LSATs. He applied to the law schools at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale “because he wanted to get into the three best ones,” says Andre Burrell, another former roommate and longtime friend. All three schools accepted Stone. He chose Stanford. From there he landed a job at the New York City-based corporate law firm Dewey Ballantine.
In an hour-long “fireside chat” with Yale students —recorded on September 10 and posted Friday— Joe Tsai says some “very, very emotional conversations” with his players led him to make the commitment he and his wife Clara have made to social justice, including his $50 million Social Justice Fund for Brooklyn announced in August.
Yale has designated three independent laboratories to perform the university-developed SalivaDirect™ COVID-19 test. Along with Yale Pathology Labs — the first to offer the test — Access Medical Laboratories, Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC), and Mirimus, Inc., represent the initial wave of providers for the innovative testing method. They will make SalivaDirect™ available to people in Florida, Minnesota and New York by late September.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization on Saturday allowing public use of a saliva-based test for the coronavirus developed at Yale University and funded by the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association. The test, known as SalivaDirect, is designed for widespread public screening. The cost per sample could be as low as about $4, though the cost to consumers will likely be higher than that -- perhaps around $15 or $20 in some cases, according to expert sources.
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Yale administered the saliva test to a group that included NBA players and staff in the lead-up to the league's return to play and compared results to the nasal swab tests the same group took. The results almost universally matched, according to published research that has not yet been peer-reviewed. The leading coronavirus saliva test, developed at a Rutgers University lab and given the same permission by the FDA in mid-April, costs individual consumers up to $150 -- though that can be reduced to $60 or $70 in some circumstances, said Andrew Brooks, an associate professor at Rutgers and chief operating officer of RUCDR Infinite Biologics, the lab behind the test. The Rutgers test can be taken at home and returns results in 24 to 48 hours.
In April, when associate research scientist in epidemiology Anne Wyllie and her team at Yale released a potentially seminal preprint on saliva testing for SARS-CoV-2, their inboxes exploded. Their results suggested that using saliva samples could be more sensitive than results from the widely used nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs.
One day in mid-May, the NBA emailed. They wanted to talk. Robby Sikka, vice president of basketball performance and technology for the Minnesota Timberwolves and a physician, sent the note, sparking a month of Zoom meetings and collaborative calls that occasionally stretched into the early hours of morning. The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association — busy plotting out the logistics of a potential return to competition — soon hatched a plan with Yale researchers to verify their saliva-based test, which is called SalivaDirect.
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