‘Harder than the hurricane’: Rockets describe COVID-19 work

Rockets trainer Keith Jones was with James Harden when the NBA closed facilities. “James had this look on his face like, ‘What do we do?'”

On March 11, the NBA decided to suspend its 2019-20 season after Utah’s Rudy Gobert became the first player to test positive for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Then, on March 19, the league took its shutdown a step further by shutting down all team facilities.

Keith Jones, senior vice president of basketball operations for the Houston Rockets and a longtime athletic trainer, delivered the news to Rockets star and former league MVP James Harden. At the time, Harden was going through an individual workout at Toyota Center.

ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski sets the scene:

Harden was shooting on the Rockets’ practice court with assistant coach John Lucas on Thursday afternoon when news reached them that the NBA had ordered the close of facilities. Keith Jones, the Rockets’ executive VP of basketball operations and a longtime athletic trainer, walked into the gym to inform Harden and Lucas.

“James just had this look on his face like, ‘What do we do?'” Jones told ESPN.

These days, each Rockets player takes his temperature upon waking up and immediately texts a photo to Jones and Jason Biles, the team’s athletic trainer. Biles also calls each player on a daily basis to check on his health, as well as that of family members, according to the story.

“It’s harder than the hurricane and harder than the lockout,” Jones told ESPN. “You have no way of getting out and seeing guys. And if this was a lockout, you’d have 10 or 12 NBA guys getting together and playing and doing their skill work. Now you can’t do that.”

Flooding from Hurricane Harvey ravaged the Houston area in the weeks just before the team’s 2017 training camp.

For now, each player is being asked by the Rockets and the NBA to stay at home as much as possible amid increased physical distancing measures, which are designed to slow the spread of the virus.

According to ESPN, the Rockets emailed each player a customized program for strength and flexibility training, as well as cardio work. The program includes video demonstrations, and the team gave each player a take-home duffel bag full of various exercise equipment.

However, when it comes to game preparation, those exercises are clearly no substitute for organized NBA basketball. Wojnarowski writes:

“We’re trying to monitor and make sure they do the most they can with what they have,” Jones told ESPN. “The tough part is what you don’t know. You don’t know how long the runway is going to be before you’re at full speed. A process that took 10 weeks [at the end of the offseason to ramp up to the regular season] might be compressed into 10 days.

“Getting their bodies conditioned to play again, we’re going to need some time. Nothing mimics NBA basketball except NBA basketball. Everybody’s going to lose that conditioning.”

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The latest projected timetable for the 2019-20 season to resume appears to be mid-to-late June, which would represent a delay of more than three months from the league’s March 11 suspension date.

For some players, that would be the same timeframe as an entire offseason, historically — going by the date when the NBA Finals usually concludes in mid-June until training camps open in late September. In that parallel, NBA players have approximately a month of training camp and preseason games until regular season play begins, and then six months of regular-season games until the playoffs begin.

In this case, as Jones suggests, organized team activities might not be possible until just days before games resume. Furthermore, only a small handful of regular-season games are likely to be played before the league’s 2020 playoffs would begin.

It’s an unprecedented situation, and the Rockets — like most NBA teams — have significant challenges ahead, if the season can be salvaged.

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