Silver expects arenas to be ‘relatively full’ next season
NBA commissioner Adam Silver says the league won’t require players to be vaccinated against Covid-19, but if progress continues against the virus the league can play a normal schedule in “relatively full” arenas next season.
“Roughly half of our teams have fans in their arenas right now and if vaccines continue on the pace they are, and they continue to be as effective as they have been against the virus and its variants, we’re hopeful that we’ll have relatively full arenas next season as well,” Silver said on Saturday in a virtual press conference on the eve of the All-Star Game in Atlanta, Georgia.
Silver said there are no plans for any overseas exhibition or regular-season games in the upcoming campaign, but he remains confident teams will be able to play a full 82-game schedule starting next October and ending in June.
“I’m fairly optimistic, at this point, that we will be able to start on time,” Silver said, adding that he believed it was a “personal decision” whether to be vaccinated “that players need to make just like everyone in our communities needs to make”.
He said the league and players association were working together to provide players with information on vaccines “and also encouraging them to seek out information on their own” from their personal physicians or other advisers.
Silver said that, to his knowledge, no NBA players had yet been vaccinated, although some coaches and other staff who qualified to be inoculated because of age or other reasons had been.
Even so, Silver said, the league’s coronavirus protocols including maskwearing, social distancing and rigorous contact tracing and quarantining, had allowed the season to proceed with only “a relatively small percentage of games” having to be postponed.
The coronavirus pandemic shut down the NBA in March of 2020, the league eventually cancelling 171 games before resuming in a quarantine bubble in Orlando, Florida.
NO PLANS TO CHANGE LOGO
The NBA has no plans to change it’s “iconic” logo, despite recent calls to make the late Kobe Bryant the image of the league, added Silver.
“The logo is iconic,” Silver said, adding that it “doesn’t feel like it’s the appropriate moment to change it.”
A change.org petition urging the league to “immortalise [Bryant] forever as the new NBA logo” has garnered more than three million signatures since Bryant died in a helicopter crash in January of 2020.