SPORTS LEAGUES CAN’T DETERMINE SAFE RETURN DATE
NBA boss admits not enough is yet known about possible risks to resume competition
Adam Silver held a conference call with reporters late on Friday that was notable only for all the things the commissioner of the National Basketball Association did not say.
He didn’t provide estimates for when the league might return to action, he didn’t outline any preferred scenarios, he didn’t suggest the NBA had given serious thought to any of the basketball-in-a-bubble concepts that have been floated as a path forward.
Silver said, essentially, that the NBA is stuck not really knowing anything.
“We’re not in a position to make any decisions, and it’s not clear when we will be,” the commissioner said. Enjoy your weekend.
That Silver was so reluctant to even lean in the direction of a potential return to play became more interesting in hindsight as the weekend unfolded, and certain flag-waving groups in the United States started banging on about ending lockdowns, in the manner of a skydiver who has seen his landing spot come into focus and decided to go ahead and close his parachute.
Those protests received encouragement from the Twitter account of Donald Trump, and while Silver was one of the sports leaders who had recently discussed the future of live games in a call with the U.S. president, his comments on Friday evening were the opposite of agitating for an economic reopening. Before anyone could ask him about potential basketball schedules, Silver said “it’s about the data, not the date,” stealing a line from Disney chairman Bob Iger, who had just spoken to the NBA’s board of governors.
It’s a snappy slogan that you could put on T-shirts, but behind it is the plain fact that so much of the data is uncertain. There is a lot about COVID-19 that’s still unknown, which will make plotting a return to any sort of normalcy difficult. Accepting that uncertainty is part of the deal at this moment in time.
Silver, to judge from the comments of one conference call, is doing that. Those protesters, and a certain high-volume tweeter? Much less so.
At one point in his session with the media, Silver was asked about the data that will guide the NBA’s decision-making on a resumption of its business. He offered four points: a reduction in the rate of new coronavirus infections (presumably referring to the U.S. and Canada), an increase in large-scale testing, and progress on antiviral treatments and a vaccine.
Those last two could be many months away, although the amount of research suddenly focused on the virus could bring breakthroughs sooner than imagined. Testing rates are bound to increase over the low per capita levels in many states and provinces, but there are already supply bottlenecks that may make true mass testing — of the type envisioned to allow sports to return — impossible in the short term.
As for infections, the growth rate of new coronavirus cases here and in the U.S. has been declining, but those trends could reverse, especially if lockdowns are eased.
Is any sports league truly going to be able to point to data in the near future and declare itself satisfied that games can be safely resumed? It’s more likely that a great deal of guesswork and hope will be involved.
Consider how little is still understood about how the virus is transmitted. A recent New York Times piece asked experts about the risk of coronavirus on things like clothes, hair and packages. The basic question was whether people should be washing all this stuff constantly, and the answer was no: the risk of coming into contact with enough virus to be infected was low, unless you were in proximity with an infected person, which no one should be doing. It was all quite reassuring, but it also raises questions about how people who are not symptomatic transmit the virus. How would someone who is not sneezing or coughing spread the virus to others, and is close contact a requirement?
There’s a medical consensus that asymptomatic transmission is a concern, but it seems fair to say that it’s not wholly understood at this point. And the reason all of this is relevant here is because it’s the thing that underpins whether sports, even without fans in the stands, can resume. Any effort to close a quarantine loop around players and staff would be quickly undone if an otherwise healthy person who doesn’t know they have the virus slips through the barriers a league might construct, especially if they could transmit it by breathing heavily.
How long will it take to sort all this out? At what point will a sports league be able to test however many thousand people it would take to operate its business in empty stadiums, and declare itself satisfied that it can keep them a safe distance from anyone else?
Honestly, it seems like no one has any idea.
That’s frustrating, to be sure. But it’s also the place we’re in. sstinson@postmedia.com twitter.com/Scott_Stinson
Silver said, essentially, that the NBA is stuck not really knowing anything. ‘We’re not in a position to make any decisions, and it’s not clear when we will be.’