https://www.yahoo.com/sports/report-almost-100-percent-chance-204257973.html
Seems with each passing day, the idea that the league will resume this season seems more unlikely.
Are you going to test players before each game for the coranavirus? I don't see how this would get implemented in a responsible way.
Oh, it's certain possible. It would be a massive undertaking, and require a lot of buy in from the players, referees, staff, and all of their families, but it could be done.
I have no idea where any of the parties actually stand on this, and there have definitely been some very vocal opponents of this. But if the people involved are on board, I do think it will happen.
I do hope, though, this isn't something being driven by TV networks or their sponsors.
It's being driven by money. The league doesn't want the national networks to hold back 25% of what they would pay the NBA for the regular season and then whatever they would make for the playoffs.
And it works the same for the players. If the league gets less money from the networks for the year, the owners would most likely invoke their right to hold back money from the players.
The owners will need to, without the money coming in from the shutdown, reconfigure the amounts for the salary cap and luxury tax amounts. If that lesser amount of money also includes less income from national networks, the amount the salary cap, luxury tax line and max contracts for players would fall would be significant and likely to require smoothing being done to offset the drops that would occur.
So it's real easy to see what is driving this. It's not because the league wants to maintain some semblance of a season, like during years we had labor shutdowns, or to ensure they crown a champion. It's all about the money.
This is kind of my issue with this too. This isn't really about basketball at all or determining who is a real champ from a level playing field. You have some players that may happen to live in New York, who can't even dream of accessing any kind of training facility for 6 weeks. Or those that live in San Francisco that have already been in a shelter in place for 3-4 weeks. You have other players that may live in Toronto, Houston, Indiana that could end up with shorter or longer time periods without access to gyms, training facilities and nutritionists depending on their cities peaks. Some players may have incredible home gyms, others may not. We really want to let things like that decide who is in best condition to play randomly in june with little to no warmup? It
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think the limitations are as restrictive as some of you all think.
Quarantine, shelter in place, non essential businesses closed, whatever the mandate is, if an NBA team wanted to practice tomorrow I don't think they'd have a problem.
It's not like the police or army are going to be patrolling the streets and barricading the doors and arresting anyone that tries to cross. I feel like I'm reading in the news everyday about places being open despite these mandates.
But for an NBA teams in an area where they're supposed to be closed, what's the penalty if they open? A small fine? A slap on the wrist? Nothing?
Even if there were strict controls and penalties in place (which there aren't), I think it would be extremely easy for every NBA team to get some special waiver that they are allowed to open their practice facility. (It's a small, controlled, environment, not open to the public, we're testing and monitoring our players health, insert more positive corporate spin here, yada, yada, yada).
Some will argue it will be a PR disaster, I disagree, but that's another argument.
I just think if the owners and players want to, they'll all have no problem getting access to basketball facilities to train and play.