The Whiteboard: What Chinese Basketball Association’s delay means for NBA
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If the Chinese Basketball Association was meant to be a measuring stick for when we could expect the NBA to return, we’ve got bad news on two fronts.
The first is that, unlike China, which took drastic, government-regulated measures to deal with novel coronavirus, the United States is trying to paint Easter as the day this pandemic dies and society rises from the dead like Jesus himself.
This is not a political statement, but rather a statement of fact: If Americans abandon quarantine and social distancing by April 12, the situation will get even worse than it’s already become, and this brightly-colored Easter date will be revealed for the flimsy egg it really is, cracking under the slightest pressure.
The second? According to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, the Chinese Basketball Association has pushed back its restart date from April 15 to May. For those unfamiliar, the CBA shut its season down in January due to the coronavirus outbreak in China, which means a May return would mark about a four-month hiatus.
As soon as the NBA suspended its season on March 12 and the U.S. finally started taking the pandemic more seriously, the CBA became an unofficial barometer for how long American basketball fans could expect to wait for the league to return.
While it’s better for chairman Yao Ming and the CBA to take the proper precautions in restarting league play under these dire circumstances, this delay goes to show just how far Americans are from enjoying NBA basketball again. The U.S. has not yet resorted to the kinds of full measures China took to curb the spread of this pandemic, and the numbers are only going to get worse.
Wednesday saw a massive spike in the number of U.S. deaths due to coronavirus, and the number of reported cases is rising dramatically with each passing day.
Because of this, the NBA will struggle to keep a similar timeline, which would see the league return to action in mid-July in this most idealistic (and unrealistic) of scenarios.
As ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported on Tuesday, the loosest of drop-dead dates for completing the NBA Finals is Labor Day weekend in September, which would mean the league would have to return to action at some point in mid- or late July.
Woj says no one in the league wants to be tied down to that Labor Day target date in order to leave the door open for salvaging its season. If the possibility exists to start later in July and finish the season out in late September, it won’t be taken off the table until it has to be.
However, all of this is operating under the premise that the United States will have its coronavirus situation under control before then. China and Italy were devastated by this pandemic, and while mandatory, government-regulated lockdowns might be taking it a step too far, looking to the CBA’s timeline as an optimistic comparison feels like a pipe dream as long as U.S. citizens refuse to stay home and take the necessary measures to prevent its spread.
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