NBA joins in on risky summer sports adventure
If you choose to avert your eyes from yet another rough day in the real world, there’s sports stuff to talk about. Specifically the picture of a potentially remarkable TV summer that’s becoming clearer by the day.
If everything goes to plan — and yes, that’s an awfully big “if” — by late July or early August we’ll have gone from starving for live sports to gorging on as many hockey and basketball games as we can stomach. Pro golf, which is expected to run a PGA Tour event next week in Fort Worth, Texas, figures to be back in the weekend rotation by then. Major League Soccer is hoping to run a World Cup-style tournament some time in the summer, too. Maybe the biggest long shot to reappear on our screens in the midst of this one-off midsummer boom is Major League Baseball, which continues the age-old battle between owners and players over its billions.
Speaking of unlikely scenarios, who’d have bet the outdoor sport that spaces nine men on a field in socially distant fashion would be the one jeopardizing its return to play, not over coronavirus-related safety but over money?
To be fair to the folks at MLB, it’s all about money. On Wednesday, a week after the NHL injected some excitement into the sporting conversation, we saw details of the NBA’s plan. You’ve probably heard the rough outlines: 22 teams, 13 from the West and nine from the East, playing eight regular-season games apiece in a prelude to the usual 16-team championship tournament. It’s slated to be played within the verdant confines of Florida’s Walt Disney World complex, where players will be free to go to restaurants and play golf, so long as they follow distancing protocols. The Raptors, currently holding the No. 2 seed in the East — and three games up on third-place Boston — remain in a favourable spot to make a credible run at a championship defence.
You could quibble with the NBA’s relatively complicated model, which includes the possibility of play-in games between the No. 8 and No. 9 seeds if they end the regular season within four or fewer games of each other. The 24team format the NHL and its players have agreed on — wherein the top four seeds in each conference play a round robin to determine seeding while the other teams partake in best-of-five play-in series — seems elegant by comparison.
And to some, the NBA plan looks ridiculously concocted for a transparent goal. There are those who’ll tell you it’s a not-so-veiled way of inserting Zion Williamson, he of the 10th-in the-West New Orleans Pelicans, back into the national conversation beyond the ugly lawsuit that’s currently threatening to expose more of college basketball’s unsavoury underbelly. Still, if getting Zion back on TV is among the primary motives, we’ll pardon the crime against simplicity — yes, he’s that good. But getting Zion back on TV clearly isn’t the only motive. Adding six teams and eight regular-season games to the mix, rather than proceeding straight to a 16-game playoff, is reportedly worth a sum in the hundreds of millions. For a sports league that’s lost revenue measured by the billion, every million counts.
The money sounds great, but here’s the bigger question: Have the NBA and NHL, like a lot of us, grown so tired of forgoing income that they’re risking their employees’ health? It didn’t go unnoticed that on Wednesday, around the time news of the NBA’s plan was breaking, Florida announced its biggest one-day surge in coronavirus cases in about six weeks, with 1,317 reported. While the world’s attention has been at least momentarily diverted from the pandemic, the pandemic doesn’t appear to have gone away. While pro sports is raring to get back in business, the virus that shut down the planet hasn’t yet closed up shop.
The idea that all these plans might turn out to be for naught isn’t exactly a fringe position.
What are the odds a 2019-20 champion won’t be crowned in the NBA and NHL? According to one bookmaker, there’s something in the range of a 40 per cent chance that one of the Larry O’Brien Trophy or Stanley Cup doesn’t end up getting handed out.
On Wednesday, the Yomiuri Giants, Japan’s most famous baseball team, called off a practice game when it was announced that two players had tested positive for the coronavirus. One of those players, Hayato Sakamoto, is known as the Derek Jeter of the Japanese game, the reigning MVP of the Central League and probably the most famous Japanese player to have so far declined to take a shot at Major League Baseball. Japan’s league is still scheduled to begin play on June 19 without fans in the stands, but the positive tests reminded everyone of the reality of return-toplay plans: They’re tentative.
Things are going worse in other jurisdictions. Last week, 16 players from the Brazilian soccer side Vasco da Gama tested positive for the virus on the eve of restarting training. This week, it was announced that the last-place team in the Ukrainian professional soccer league was harbouring something in the range of 25 cases of coronavirus among players and staff. Which is only to say: This virus doesn’t appear to have lost its ability to spread.
That’s not to say positive tests will squelch any given restart. Last month, two players from the second division of German men’s pro soccer tested positive for coronavirus just a week before the Bundesliga was set to reopen. That same team saw at least a couple more cases in the days that followed. And yet, the Bundesliga reopened. That’s the feeling emanating from the NHL and NBA: A positive test or two won’t stop the unprecedented sports-TV summer that’s rounding into focus. Whether or not it’s wise or realistic or sufficiently safe to finish these seasons, it’s coming.