Barkley sees play resuming
Sir Charles ‘100% certain’ games will return soon
The NBA is moving closer to sending players back onto the court to complete the season, with Charles Barkley saying he is “100% sure we’re going to play.” The NBA was the league others looked to as they considered whether to continue their seasons when the novel coronavirus pandemic took hold in early March and now many of them seem to be waiting to see how the NBA sorts out what’s left of its regular season and playoffs. It is doing just that on a pivotal week for the rest of the 2019-20 season.
“I do know this, talking to my bosses at Turner, we’re going to play basketball,” Barkley, an analyst on TNT’s “Inside the NBA,” said Monday on ESPN’s “The Paul Finebaum Show.” “It’s gonna be in Florida and Vegas, or just Florida.”
The decision is coming soon, with states beginning to open up again. On Saturday, the NBA said it had begun “exploratory conversations” with the Walt Disney Co. to host a single-site campus for games, practices and housing for players and staffers at the vast ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex near Orlando.
“We’re gonna make a decision in the next week,” Barkley said. “I’m 100% sure we’re going to play. I know my friends in Major League Baseball are going to play. I think that the hockey league is going to play.
“I think the pro football and the college football, they have to sit back and see how it goes for us.”
The league plans to hold a conference call with its board of governors on Friday, and teams expect to be asked to instruct players to report to their home markets around June 1, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported last week.
The NBA indefinitely suspended its season March 11 when Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the virus, setting off a cascade of suspended seasons as sports came to a halt. Now, though, that’s changing. Major League Baseball and the players’ union face a critical two weeks as they work to salvage the season and the NHL is targeting early next month as the start date for Phase 2 of its return-to-play protocol. With the NBA leading the way, it said “late July” is the time frame for resuming games, if the virus cooperates.
“Our priority continues to be the health and safety of all involved,” the NBA statement said, “and we are working with public health experts and government officials on a comprehensive set of guidelines to ensure that appropriate medical protocols and protections are in place.”
It would return to the court in multiple phases, people with knowledge of the league’s thinking told The Post’s Ben Golliver, with an initial quarantine period for players.
Most of the NBA’s 30 teams have reopened their practice facilities for individual workouts, but other facilities have remained shuttered because of local government orders.
In any event, the clarity players have been seeking appears close and it would stand to reason that the NBA’s broadcast partners would have an idea what may be coming. Players “really want to play,” Michele Roberts, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, told ESPN, describing team-byteam virtual calls with players as a joint task force between the league and union has been negotiating plans to resume the season.
“It’s time. It’s time,” Roberts said. “It’s been two and a half months of, ‘What if?’ My players need some level of certainty. I think everybody does.”