‘Single greatest challenge’ likely awaits
Ways to salvage season uncertain as Silver addresses players
NBA commissioner Adam
Silver spent an hour addressing questions and examining realities. He said almost as much with what he could not answer. He had joined the National Basketball Players Association teleconference Friday and sought, among other things, to describe the challenges that will come for their business and sport amid the COVID-19 crises.
Yet, as forthcoming as Silver was, he could not answer the most pressing questions about when and how the NBA might restart its season. When the choices are all bad, it is difficult to pick one.
Monday will mark two months since the night the NBA stopped. The United States had roughly 1,300 cases of COVID-19 then, the day the WHO declared the novel Coronavirus a pandemic. By the time Silver addressed the players association, the United States had almost 1.3 million.
After nearly two months to consider options, having declared all ideas welcome, Silver told the league’s players that no decisions about restarting the season would come this month or likely in early June.
Still, amid all that must be determined, much became clear.
Most of all, according to ESPN, Silver told players: “This could turn out to be the single greatest challenge of all our lives.”
For the NBA, Silver described the long-assumed expectation that if the season is resumed it will be without fans in attendance is a relative given, but that even next season could be played without fans on site until a vaccine is readily available.
Playing without fans would cut roughly 40 percent of the league’s revenue, Silver said, a hit that even in the NBA system in which players salaries are tied to basketball related income would likely require extensive collective bargaining. The league and players agreed to withhold 25 percent from Friday’s paychecks.
Even beyond the economics, the idea of playing without fans would make it preferable to hold games in one or two locations — Las Vegas and Orlando were mentioned — to further isolate players and staff from the general public. There have been reservations about locking the league in a hotel, but Silver indicated that would not be necessary since any effort to restart the season would require extensive testing of everyone involved.
The guidelines for the opening of some facilities last Friday could offer indications of how the NBA might operate for practices and the resumption of a schedule. After initially prohibiting the testing of asymptomatic players and staff members for COVID-19, the league tweaked that directive to permit testing where local health authorities indicate there is enough testing resources for at-risk health care workers and some other asymptomatic individuals.
Opening facilities to players for individual, voluntary workouts with extremely limited staff participation was viewed as an alternative to players using public gyms where stay-at-home guidelines had been loosened, rather than a step toward restarting the season. But allowing some testing could be indicative of the sort of shift that would be needed to hold practices and games.
Widespread testing would have to be available for the NBA to resume play to avoid a repeat of the circumstances that shut down the league March 11 when Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive.
Without a vaccine, some positive tests are considered inevitable. If the league resumes play, even in one or several locations, it would want to not only quickly identify anyone that tests positive, but to do contact tracing and frequently test all participants in the hopes that any positive test would not shut down the season again.
Ownership, Silver said, has been united in a preference to salvage the 2019-20 season, though with little to gain for franchises without hopes of a post-season. The league could have a limited regular-season schedule, though that would leave little incentive for teams out of the playoffs. It could hold a play-in tournament, but that might be unfair to teams solidly in the playoffs when the season was suspended.
Few details were discussed about how the regular season might be completed, but Silver said the league hopes to have a postseason with the customary best-of-seven playoff format for all four rounds.
That could not happen without an extensive training camp that Silver described as lasting at least three weeks. But given the time away with workouts far more limited than during an off-season or work stoppage, a training camp could require even more time.
The delay in the start of next season if the 2019-20 season is resumed can be considered inevitable, with sentiment growing for a Christmas day or even later start. That could move at least some of the next NBA season closer to when a vaccine might be available, or it could just buy more time for the next decisions.
The more immediate challenge is to make the decisions about the resumption of the season on hold for two months, with another two months likely to be spent before the 2019-20 season could return if it does.