The NBA board of governors and the NBPA approved a plan to resume the regular season in Orlando on July 31st with 22 of the 30 NBA teams, but some players are concerned about the plan and could potentially choose not to return to work, according to a report by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
Interestingly, the NBPA went ahead with the plan before seeing the NBA’s final guidelines for protocol inside a bubble environment at Disney World in Florida, where many teams could be stuck for several months. According to Brian Windhorst, the official document detailing what players are and are not allowed to do will be more than 100 pages long – and several players are worried about what they could be getting themselves into. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that “a few dozen” NBA players held a conference call to discuss their concerns over the NBA’s planned quarantine.
“In the last week, 10 days, I think it’s really started to hit home with players and coaches and members of organizations of how isolating, how restrictive this bubble environment is going to be. There are a number of players, I was told a few dozen, who have been talking. They had at least one conference call to kind of hash out some thoughts among each other.
For a lot of players, there are family concerns. There are certainly concerns about COVID. There are concerns about a number of issues built around having to go inside that bubble – many of them for five weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, two and a half, three months. Especially, you hear it more and more among the teams who know, or certainly believe they’re not really going there to compete to win a championship.”
Wojnarowski also reported that the NBPA and NBA are expected to announce that players will be able to skip the season restart in Orlando should they choose, but those players would not be paid for the remainder of the season.
“I was told that the union and the league have essentially agreed on a plan that if players don’t want to go to Orlando, they will not have to go. They will not be punished by their teams. Now, they will also not get paid for those missed games.”
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