The NBA’s hard choice

“We are left with no choice but to learn to live with this virus. No options are risk-free right now... Yet we can’t sit on the sidelines indefinitely, and we must adapt.”

– NBA Commissioner Adam Silver

In the last two weeks, more and more NBA players have been revealed to have been infected with COVID-19. In one sense, you can’t really blame them, as they are still trying to live regular lives, and have to be exposed to other people in practice and other facets of their lives. In a country where personal freedom is often presumed to outweigh public safety, you cannot guarantee how other people protect themselves (and you) from these kinds of infectious diseases.

Be that as it may, it now adds to the burden of the NBA, tipping the scales towards canceling the season anew. The league has already studied and taken measures (single venue, self-quarantine, regular testing) to minimize the risk of infection. But what they can control – for now – is the potential for infection to spread outwards from the players and team officials.

But when the games begin, you’d still have referees, technical officials, sanitation, escorts, security personnel, drivers, medical teams, video researchers, food service staff, writers, production personnel, camera crews and others within the venue. You can’t quarantine and test all these people, who are, in effect, casual or part-time workers for the games. Unless everyone is tested weekly, wear PPEs to the games, or eat, urinate and defecate individually, there is still a substantial risk of exposure.

The next question is: are they going to allow media to cover the games? In this writer’s experience, US national media don’t usually send beat reporters to early regular season games. They just get the stats and/or pick up the stories from the local or regional media. But in this case, where everyone is just in one place and literally every game counts, coverage is a must. How do they insulate the players and others from people they can’t cloister with everyone else? Do the media cover from the safety of the bleachers or luxury boxes, or simply do it off-tube? How do you make sure they don’t infect each other?

If you look outside at the NBA’s environment, the COVID-19 situation in the US has been getting worse, even hitting 50,000 new cases in one day. The anti-mask protesters, meanwhile, have exacerbated the situation by becoming more and more virulent in their fight for their alleged rights to not cover their faces. One study showed that if only 80 percent of Americans wore masks, the infected could have been as low as only eight percent of where it stands now. Given this grave milieu, is it even proper to have a basketball tournament at all? From the NBA’s standpoint, hundreds of big companies in several industries have already shut down or declared bankruptcy. Meanwhile, despite having very little income, the league is legally obligated to keep on paying for players’ salaries, which account for more than half of normal league revenues.

On another important point, the NBA has become a symbol for other businesses and sports organizations. It has kept the door open for event organizers and other businesses. For everyone trying to figure out how to keep going and keeping an audience, the NBA is seen as a leader.

At what point will the league say enough is enough, and just cancel the season? When does the inability to control circumstance win and force everyone back into hibernation? In this regard, NBA is dipping its foot back into the water for all of us.