NBA out of bubble and into trouble
The bubble worked, but they couldn’t go back.
It had been hard enough to persuade everybody to leave their families and hole up in a hotel room for a couple of months last year. A full NBA season at Disney World — or in any other single location — never was going to happen.
So the league widely hailed as a coronavirus role model ventured out into America, where it learned two incontrovertible truths:
The honor system has its flaws.
And this isn’t over yet. On Tuesday, the games — some of them anyway — went on, with the NBA’S board of governors deciding against taking a break to regroup. With positive tests and contact tracing causing roster sizes to dwindle across the league, postponements are expected beyond the six games that have been scuttled so far this season.
The NBA, like Major League Baseball and the NFL before it, has decided the best way to react to the scheduling disruption is to live with it.
With the blessing of the players association, the league tightened its pandemic protocols Tuesday, including implementing a rule that should have been in place all along. From now on, when teams are on the road, players will not be allowed to have nonteam guests in their rooms.
Previously, players had been permitted to have up to
two family members or “longstanding” personal friends as guests, and while that rule led to some rather obvious jokes about who qualified, it also provides a perfect parallel to the kind of exceptions too many people who don’t play professional basketball have tried to rationalize over the past few months.
Everybody thinks that one visit with someone we trust won’t hurt anything, and the next thing you know, cases, hospitalizations and deaths are hitting record levels.
This is why even though the NBA announced a slew of other restrictions — shorter locker-room meetings, revamped seating charts on planes, increased in-game mask usage on the bench, etc. — it’s no secret that the league’s chances of playing on hinge more on how it limits its interactions with people away from the workplace.
“I think (the arena is) the safest place you can be,” Philadelphia coach Doc Rivers told ESPN on Tuesday. “It’s when we walk outside that the real world comes into our bubble.”
And the truth is the NBA now has no more of a “bubble” than the NFL, or college football, or your office. People come and go every day, and go home at night to others who work or shop for groceries or take kids to school, and no amount of testing can guarantee everyone’s safety.
Players might have been reluctant to accept this before. But aside from some holdouts like Nets guard Kyrie Irving — who’s missed four games and appeared to be maskless while attending a birthday party on a recent video circulating on social media — most are realizing they need to either embrace stricter measures or forget finishing the season.
“We’re at a point now that we have to re-evaluate or the NBA has to re-evaluate and see how everything is going,” Oklahoma City center Al Horford told reporters on a video conference Tuesday before the Thunder played the Spurs. “But more importantly, we have to continue to take care of ourselves and stay diligent, because this virus is not going anywhere.”
Said Spurs center Jakob Poeltl: “It’s the same for everybody. We just got to get through it. Keep on moving, and hopefully it will get better soon.”
Not to quibble with Poeltl’s optimism, but hope can’t be a strategy. Until vaccinations are widely available, the NBA season will continue to play out on a tightrope, and that probably means several more months of adjustments.
The league made some changes Tuesday. It probably will need to make more later, whether that includes expanding rosters or instituting a midseason hiatus.
As for Disney World? Putting the whole league onto one quarantined campus worked, but it’s not a realistic option at this point. The season is too long, and those who were secluded there last summer don’t want to go back.
So across America, the NBA is learning it didn’t outsmart the pandemic last year. On the contrary, the league took it so seriously that it concluded the only way to escape it was also to escape the real world.
And out here, there’s no such thing as a bubble.