The NBA’s players and their owners are publicly holding out hope to potentially salvage the 2019-20 season and still crown a 2020 NBA Champion. However, even the dream scenario for the NBA, a potential tournament-style event in a quarantined setting in Las Vegas, is going to be tremendously difficult and costly, in terms of both money and lacking resources in the fight against coronavirus.
While that sounds easy enough to understand on its face, NBC’s Tom Haberstroh interviewed several epidemiologists, including Harvard’s Dr. Caroline Buckee, who believe that the logistics of pulling off such an event, in a truly safe way, would be almost impossible. As I wrote yesterday, the logistics of even bringing in NBA staff, let alone all those who would need to work in hospitality for the players, staff and the rest of the people there for the event.
“It sounds like potentially a bad idea,” Dr. Buckee said in a Zoom interview. “I don’t think it’s realistic to completely isolate and quarantine the players. For a start, there are people who will need to clean their rooms, feed them, wash their clothes, janitorial staff and so forth. And those people will not be protected and they will be interacting with their communities.
“It is very difficult to truly self-isolate. Purposefully putting people at risk seems foolish.”
The NBA has already received a decent amount of criticism after several teams were tested for coronavirus. Were they to undertake a quarantine tournament, the costs of it, especially when hospitals around the country are facing shortages of needed supplies, would come off as even worse if things don’t improve drastically.
So although Adam Silver and even some players are holding out hope of a potential tournament or a way to salvage a season they’ve put so much into, it’s increasingly looking like the NBA will have to join the Olympics, Wimbledon, and European Soccer as leagues who will have to hang ’em up until the pandemic slows down, or a vaccine is made.
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