NBA may return too soon
Concerns, complexities still difficult for league to navigate
This is a critical week for the NBA. Building up to Friday’s virtual meeting between ownership representatives from the league’s 30 teams and Commissioner Adam Silver, league officials are lasering in on a scheduling format to present to the players’ union to finish out a rebooted 2019-20 season.
Mark Cuban, the owner of the Mavericks, advised me Monday that he thought it would more realistically be “over the next two weeks that the big decisions will be made,” but they are coming soon.
“We are going to play basketball,” Charles Barkley said in a text message.
Barkley told Paul Finebaum of ESPN the same in a radio interview Tuesday, saying that his Turner Sports bosses had advised him to get ready to come back to work as an analyst.
The league’s publicly stated target is to play games at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Florida, albeit with an undetermined number of teams, starting in “late July.” Players leaguewide are thus preparing to be summoned to return to their team markets as early as next week for quarantine measures and a gradual return to 5-on-5 practices, all in anticipation for the eventual move to the complex at Walt Disney World in Orlando.
In other words: Momentum behind an NBA comeback, nearly 80 days into the league’s abrupt shutdown, is as strong as we’ve seen.
“It’s been 21⁄2 months of, ‘What if?’ ” Michele Roberts, the president of the National Basketball Players Association, told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne. “My players need some level of certainty. I think everybody does.”
Indeed. Who wouldn’t want a little more sureness right now? Yet I must confess that I also feel increasing uneasiness the closer we get to the game’s return. As slowly as things may be moving for hoops-starved fans, and even the players as Roberts suggested, there’s a nagging sense that the comeback wheels are still spinning faster than they should.
The NBA is not merely a full-contact sport but one played indoors. The amount of encouragement the league can thus take from the relatively promising start to German soccer’s top-flight comeback, two weeks in, is offset by longstanding warnings from public health experts that the coronavirus is more readily transmitted indoors than outdoors.
A general manager asked me the other day to make a case that the NBA world feels appreciably safer than it did March 11 when Silver suspended operations. It’s a subjective question, to be sure, but I couldn’t muster much pushback to the GM’s argument that money reasons are the only reasons to support resuming the season now.
The league’s go-to counter to such claims is that conditions are unlikely to be safer in October, November and December than they are now — and that it could be catastrophic financially for all sides in the sport to delay a return when safety assurances don’t appear to be coming any time soon. So there is little to be gained, such thinking holds, by waiting for more progress toward the development of a vaccine breakthrough that is likely far down the road.
It’s an argument that must resonate given that Roberts told Shelburne, based on the union’s ongoing discussions with its membership, that “the players really want to play.”
Compared to the much more contentious dynamic between the league and the players’ union in Major League Baseball, NBA players generally leave the impression that they believe in the league’s ability to craft suitably detailed safety protocols for a return to play. They know that the union’s president, Thunder guard
Chris Paul, is in constant contact with Silver — and they heard directly from Silver earlier this month about the league’s confidence that it can obtain the number of kits needed to facilitate a large-scale testing program before games would restart without inviting more criticism from politicians or the public.
Yet so many unknowns persist, even if you accept the idea that the league can implement mass testing with rapid results — and without cutting into the public supply.
Among the unknowns:
■ How rigidly will the NBA control access into and out of its “campus” base at Disney to try to combat the spread of the coronavirus?
■ How will players’ bodies react to what, for many, will ultimately amount to a thoroughly uncharacteristic three-plus months away from the game.
■ How unsightly, beyond the potential injuries, will the standard of play be after that sort of layoff?
■ And how comfortable will players, coaches and team staffers be with the added risks attached to playing indoors compared to working in the more expansive spaces seen in soccer, football and baseball?
The more pressing curiosity, judging by how hard various teams are lobbying this week for the scenarios most advantageous to them, is what schedule constructions the league office will pitch to the players. Namely how many teams will be invited to Orlando; whether or not they will try to wedge in some regular-season games first; and which of the dizzying myriad playoff concepts is ultimately employed.
Those, though, are purely competitive details.
As he acknowledged to the players in a May 8 conference call, for Silver “the most significant question ultimately is: Can we play without compromising your safety?” Silver also stressed that “no decision we make will be risk-free.”
“Places are opening up,” Malcolm Miller of the Raptors said Saturday in a cautionary post on Twitter. “Let’s not forget COVID isn’t magically less contagious now.”
The NBA has lapped up praise from those who described its decision to suspend the season March 11, when the Jazz’s Rudy Gobert tested positive, as so decisive that it transmitted the severity of the coronavirus outbreak to the American people as loudly as any development in sports or entertainment.
What that also means, of course, is that no league will be scrutinized more closely as it makes its comeback steps.
I badly want to be wrong about my fears that things are happening too fast. I hope I am merely worrying too much like I always do — what I was born to do, really, after inheriting my father Reuven’s internal supercomputer for worrying.
But I can’t help it. On the verge of the NBA’s comeback, I can’t stop fretting about how the league can manage to stay back in the face of this unpredictable virus.
Something tells me that at least some of the league’s power brokers, deep down, feel the same.