The National Basketball Association suspended play on March 12 with at least a 30-day stoppage in mind.
That hiatus is not going to be lifted at any time soon and NBA commissioner Adam Silver is not likely to make a decision before the first of May.
There were talks that the league might restart in mid-or-late June with a 5-to-7-game regular action (a total of 259 games were left at the time of the suspension with all 30 clubs having played between 63 and 67 games each.
The Los Angeles Lakers, the No. 1 team in the West Conference at 49-14, had already played 63 games (with one game postponed following the untimely death of all-time Lakers great Kobe Bryant along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven other people last January 26 in a fiery helicopter crash in Calabasas, California).
The San Antonio Spurs also completed 63 assignments and were in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time in 22 seasons at 27-36, 12th in the West even though they were only three games behind the eighth-place Memphis Grizzlies (32-33) in the race for the final playoff ticket from the conference.
The Los Angeles Clippers were second in the West at 44-20, the Denver Nuggets ranked third at 43-22 and the Utah Jazz, now in the midst of a feud between All-Star Rudy Gobert and high-scoring guard Donovan Mitchell following the French center’s cavalier attitude toward the coronavirus disease that infected him and the latter), were at the No. 4 slot in the conference with a 41-23 mark.
The Milwaukee Bucks were an NBA-leading 53-12 in 65 outings, one more than their closest East challengers Toronto Raptors (46-18) and Boston Celtics (43-21). The Miami Heat ranked fourth in the conference at 41-24.
The Atlanta Hawks, the second worst unit in the East at 20-47, have the most number of games played at 67. They were just ahead of the New York Knicks, whose team owner James Dolan tested positive for COVID-19, in the East standings.
Out West, the Dallas Mavericks, behind NBA MVP contender and triple-double threat Luka Doncic and rejuvenated Latvian frontliner Kristaps Porzingis, also had played 67 games before the stoppage with a seventh-ranking 40-27 ledger, trailing the Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets, both sharing fifth place with identical 40-24 records.
With the America now the epicenter of the global COVID-19 pandemic with nearly 17,000 fatalities and half a million people infected with the virus, there is growing fear that the peak has not been reached and the so-called “flattening curve” probably a month away.
That’s why the NBA is now looking at another date for its game resumption – probably August – with a champion to be crowned by the Labor Day weekend (U.S. Labor Day falls on the first Monday of September, or September 7 this year).
The NBA players want a champion declared but their safety and health is the main concern of Silver. According to a reliable medical report, blacks in America have been more prone to being infected and killed by COVID-19 and when the NBA is composed of 70 percent of African Americans, one needs to have a cautious approach to the return of the games, even without the fans in attendance.
Then again, the rest of the 2019-20 NBA wars may just be canceled altogether with the pro league absorbing a loss of at least $1billion (or probably as high as $1.2 billion) in revenues.
In the end, there’s just no way for living humans to predict when world sports competitions can resume for there’s no way for the coronavirus to go away completely unless a vaccine comes along swiftly.
And medical scientists believe a vaccine can only be available by 2021.
In short, it’s very hard to resume sporting activities in the next six months or so – taking into consideration the social distancing, wearing of face masks and frequent washing of hands or protection against the virus. There is even talk now that the distance that the coronavirus can travel is up to13 feet or more than double the currently accepted norm of 6 feet. Wow!
In basketball parlance, it’s the invincible and invisible COVID-19 that will dictate the tempo of the game. The timeline – when to vanish in thin air – is her alone to make.
Are we then looking forward to year 2021 for sports activities to stage a comeback?
Note that before this, the last major flu pandemic that the world had experienced was the 1918 Spanish (H1N1) influenza holocaust that lasted for 2 years and 11 months (January 1918-December 1920) before it caught its last breath. This affected 500 million people – a quarter of the world population at the time – and resulted in at least 50 million fatalities. It was the worst health problem that the world had experienced since the Black Death or Pestilence (1346-1353) in Europe and the Near East.
Scary isn’t it? Let’s pray that history does not repeat itself. And a vaccine against the virus is discovered sooner than later.
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