The NBA season is currently on hiatus as the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States continues to spread exponentially and three players — Rudy Gobert, Donovan Mitchell, and Christian Wood — have all tested positive for the coronavirus in the last week.
The league has made its intentions to suspend play for at minimum 30 days, but it is growing increasingly likely that hiatus lasts much longer. The CDC issued a recommendation — that could become a mandate — that all gatherings over 50 people should be canceled or postponed for the next eight weeks, which would mean into at least mid-May. That would almost assuredly include the NBA, where even playing games with bare bones staff and no fans would bring the total of people in an arena to near 50 if not over.
Beyond following CDC guidelines, the league will have trouble starting the season until they can be sure every player is not carrying the virus — along with coaches, trainers, and those essential staffers. Given the lack of testing currently available to the American public, it seems like that will be a difficult task to complete within the next eight weeks — even on the unlikely circumstance that everyone in the league is indeed not carrying the virus.
As such, the league appears to be bracing for a much later return date, as ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports executives believe a mid-June start is more of a best-case scenario.
CDC recommendation of no events of 50-plus people for next two months comes as a number of NBA owners and executives increasingly believe a best case scenario is a mid-to-late June return to play — with no fans. League's scouting for possible arena dates all the way thru August.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) March 15, 2020
There are still hurdles to clear there, given, again, it seems an impossibility for the league to restart play without negative tests for everyone. The hope of many is that warm weather will help to slow the spread of the virus, but given its aggressive nature it is hard to tell exactly how it will react — along with the insistence of many to disregard social distancing right now, where every day only raises the exponential growth and spread of the virus.
The NHL, MLB, MLS, PGA Tour, and NASCAR have all also suspended their seasons, and the NCAA has already called off all spring championships in athletics as many colleges and universities consider suspending the semester in full. All must be prepared for a significant delay in their seasons, stretching into the summer, and other entities like the NFL must be considering postponing festivities such as the NFL Draft.
As such, sports fans should expect a much longer hiatus than 30 days or even the eight-week suggestion of the CDC, as that seems optimistic. In order to assist sports leagues in returning to play, fans can do one thing and one thing only, practice social distancing an all recommended best practices to avoid spreading the virus and be ready to do so for a fairly significant amount of time in order to, hopefully, bring this thing under control.
