The coronavirus pandemic currently disrupting the Boston Celtics and wider NBA season is going to require much adaptability and ingenuity from the league and its composite teams.
In order to continue moving back towards something resembling normalcy, the league will have to adjust a number of critical operating procedures and events, and how teams handle the 2020 NBA Draft is just one of them.
Apart from the incredibly-fraught difficulty of hosting workouts, the draft combine, and even the event itself, issues regarding how to determine lottery order are themselves no simple task.
If there is a possibility of resuming at least some of the regular season, those games will likely impact the draft.
But, the possibility exists that reverse order based on current standings may be the only path forward for non-lottery teams, and even the lottery process itself presents significant hurdles.
The accounting firms, league officials and team representatives included to ensure legitimacy and create the entertainment product we all wait for the results of year-to-year seem at best extraneous, and could represent a significant risk to public health as are other, non-essential gatherings.
How the league would conduct the lottery might have to rely on a skeleton crew of individuals and a whole lot of trust from team governors.
“When is the draft? When is the combine? … Will there even be a draft?”
—@UKCoachCalipari on preparing his players for the NBA Draft amid uncertainty pic.twitter.com/bVIZHxNTNZ
— ESPN (@espn) March 12, 2020
If the season were to end right now, Boston would own the 17th overall pick via the Memphis Grizzlies, the 26th pick (their own) and the 30th (via the league-best Milwaukee Bucks).
This brings us to the other end of the logistical nightmare, the assessment of prospects and the event of the draft itself.
It’s impossible to predict when such events might happen as much as how, meaning we’ll need a lot more context to really be able to say anything substantive about how the pandemic could affect them,
But it’s a very realistic prospect that there will simply not be any draft combine or workouts, or if there are, that they’d be conducted remotely with the aid of small crews of help local to the athlete on a prospect-by-prospect basis.
This isn’t the end of the world, as teams have been scouting prospects for years in most cases and have a wealth of data and film to review (and more time than usual to do it), it still robs teams of the chance to see how prospects might mesh with their system, staff, and philosophy.
Players may have to make decisions on entering 2020 NBA Draft with reality that there could be no opportunity to audition for teams individually, or attend a combine. The unknown certainly extends to college underclassmen. https://t.co/yQ3b3q3Vof
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) March 17, 2020
Will the draft be in a context when smaller crowds can gather again?
It’s impossible to say right now, but the possibility of the first entirely-remote draft may be on the table if quarantine footing is required longer than the eight-week period promoted by the Centers for Disease Control.
What that would look like and how it would work again remain beyond the scope of our ability to project.
It would also likely signal further disruption to team sports worldwide.
So, let’s cross our fingers, wash our hands, and stay in as much as humanly possible for our individual contexts, and hope we don’t have to address such problems in the future — while preparing for the possibility that we might.
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