THE American professional league National Basketball Association (NBA) has been without game action since March 12 (March 13, Manila time) due to the global coronavirus pandemic that has so far infected seven players – namely, Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell of the Utah Jazz, Christian Wood of the Detroit Pistons, and Kevin Durant and his three other teammates with the Brooklyn Nets.
As we write this, more than 182,000 people from around 150 countries have been infected with COVID-19 – the official name for the novel coronavirus given by the World Health Organization and is now considered a pandemic.
More than 79,000 people have recovered from COVID-19 so far, mostly from China where the first cases of the disease broke out in the city of Wuhan
While the disease causes mild or moderate symptoms in most people, it nonetheless has resulted in 7,100 deaths thus far. The victims mostly are the elderly or people with existing health issues.
The original declaration for the suspension of NBA games last March 11 (March 12, Manila time) was for at least three weeks following the Gobert and Mitchell diagnosis.
With KD and three other Nets having tested positive for COVID-19 last March 17, another 14 days have been added to the original date of NBA game suspension lasting at least 30 days.
Earlier, 14 days were also added to the time frame after Detroit frontliner Wood, who in a recent game had matched up well against Utah’s Rudy Gobert (the first NBA player known to have tested positive for the coronavirus) also was diagnosed with the illness last March 14.
Why 14 days? It’s because the incubation period of the virus is 14 days and it leads to a necessary quarantine.
It is universally accepted that in a doctor-patient relationship, the name of a patient cannot be revealed to the public without his consent. Permission by the patient is needed.
And that’s why maybe that the names of the three Brooklyn Nets players who have tested positive for the coronavirus have not be revealed to the public. In the case of a fourth Net, injured Kevin Durant, he himself has made a public admission of his COVID-19 illness.
Durant, who is out for the entire 2019-20 NBA campaign after undergoing June surgery for a ruptured right Achilles tendon he suffered during the NBA Finals while donning the Golden State Warriors colors, was in attendance when the Nets beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 104-102, at the Staples Center last March 10, or a day before the Rudy Gobert diagnosis came out and spurred the NBA to suspend the games hours later.
With the positive result of the four Nets players, the Lakers players and team officials are now undergoing tests for the virus and exercising self-quarantine.
The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention has already recommended an eight-week ban on in-person events or mass gatherings that consist of 50 or more people throughout the U.S.
The NBA will follow the guidelines set by the CDC although we are likely looking at a three-month hiatus till mid-June to resume regular season action, if ever.
Cancellation of the NBA season and playoffs remain an option. The NBA is a worldwide $8 business operation and the league stands to lose around S500 million in revenues for the remaining 259 regular games left to play. Then there’s more money to go down the drain if the playoffs were to be wiped out as well.
The ongoing worldwide health crisis remains so fluid so that one by one, various sports events here and abroad have been postponed, if not totally canceled.
Normally, at this time, we would have been talking about the glamorous 68-school U.S. NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, or the so-called annual March Madness, that would have unwrapped yesterday. (Does anybody still remember that the University of Virginia won its first national crown a year ago?)
The one-billion-dollar revenues that were expected from the three-week NCAA competitions were left on the table due to the coronavirus pandemic that has infected the United States as well as European countries such as Italy, Spain, France and Germany and into as far as Australia in Oceania.
Of the seven continents, only Antarctica was spared. Do people really live in that part of the world?
By mid-March, Australia’s National Basketball League (NBL) also announced the cancellation of the final two games of its best-of-five final playoffs between the defending titlist Perth Wildcats and the Sydney Kings.
The Kings topped the regular campaign and the first rounds of the postseason but found themselves trailing, 2-1, in the finals after the Wildcats grabbed the first and third games of the series.
With the venom of the coronavirus already spreading in various countries, the second and third games were held behind closed doors with no fans in attendance.
Game Four was to be held in Perth, where the Wildcats could have wrapped it up for a second straight season but the Kings were unwilling to travel to the Western Australia State due to the coronavirus outbreak and a quarantine requirement in place there.
And so, the most successful season in NBL history ended with a champion undeclared, no thanks to COVID-19.