NBA plans to play rest of season without fans in attendance due to coronavirus

According to the latest report, it won’t be long before the NBA announces its decision to play the rest of the season without fans in attendance due to coronavirus.

It’s not official yet, but the NBA may have played its last game with fans in attendance Wednesday night.

According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the league’s board of governors reached a general consensus after a conference call that the rest of the regular season schedule should be played without fans in attendance amidst the growing threat of novel coronavirus.

Per Woj, commissioner Adam Silver is expected to move in that direction with an official decision on Thursday:

As Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe reported earlier, the NBA weighed its options on Wednesday’s conference call, and the general consensus was that games should either be played without fans in attendance or the league should take a hiatus for a short period of time.

The Athletic‘s Sam Amick reported that the league was considering this second option, asking teams for their arena’s schedule through July as a contingency plan should the season need to be suspended or postponed.

It appears that safer line of thinking won’t win out, however, even though several teams were willing to put games on hiatus. The rest preferred eliminating fans from games and playing as scheduled, while apparently, the New York Knicks were content with the status quo until a governmental mandate:

To this point, the league had implemented temporary media protocol to restrict locker room access to players and essential team personnel only; the Golden State Warriors were going to play games without fans in attendance in compliance with the San Francisco Health Office’s ban of public gatherings of more than 1,000 people for the next two weeks; and the league had considered options like playing games without fans or moving games to NBA cities or neutral sites where coronavirus outbreaks have not been reported yet.

Being proactive about the threat of spreading coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes, is good, but the NBA might not be doing enough on this front. After all, the NCAA announced it won’t have fans in attendance for March Madness in both its Mens and Womens basketball tournaments, and overseas, Italian soccer club Juventus announced one of its players, Daniele Rugani, tested positive for coronavirus. How long before an NBA player tests positive and the league is forced to go into lockdown?

To date, more than 115,000 cases (and 4,200 deaths) have been confirmed in more than 70 countries worldwide, including the United States, which has seen more than 1,000 affected Americans and 31 deaths.

The World Health Organization declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on Jan. 30 and countries have implemented curfews, travel bans and mandatory quarantines to help prevent its spread.

For more information about COVID-19, visit the CDC’s website or the website for your state’s Department of Health.