The Whiteboard: NBA return has a timeframe … and myriad obstacles with it

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Two months and one day after the NBA suspended its season due to novel coronavirus, the league is already looking to lead another domino effect among the nation’s major sports leagues.

As ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported Tuesday night, following a call between commissioner Adam Silver and the board of governors, participants left the conversation with a sense of optimism about the NBA starting back up again soon. According to The Athletic’s Shams Charania, Silver will be targeting the next 2-4 weeks to make a decision, giving us a specific timeframe for the first time since the hiatus began back on March 11.

By all accounts, it feels like this is definitely happening.

This is obviously exciting at surface level. NBA fans have gone more than two months without basketball before, but that’s usually during the offseason, after the completion of the playoffs, when there are still other sports on and thousands of people aren’t dying from a pandemic. There are larger issues at play here, obviously, but the absence of the kind of welcome distraction NBA basketball can provide in times like these is even more noticeable during a period of quarantine.

However, as exciting as it’d be to have NBA playoff basketball grace our televisions by June or July, there are myriad obstacles that come with such a decision, and it’d be downright irresponsible to ignore the overwhelming feeling that this is all happening too fast.

To be fair, any return to play would come with risk. That’s just the nature of our reality until a COVID-19 vaccine is created. For the players, coaches, team staffers, referees and event staff included in whatever Orlando or Las Vegas bubble the league decides upon, they will be bearing the brunt of that risk.

It’s encouraging the players want to get the season started again (well, the ones on playoff teams, at least), but it has to be their decision, and it has to be unanimous. Several players had mentioned last week that they already felt pressure to return to their practice facilities as they prepared to reopen, so if the players were to accept the risk they’d be incurring by agreeing to play basketball again, it would have to be because they want to, not because they feel pressured to help restart the economy or provide us self-isolators with entertainment at home.

There’s the obvious financial angle that will motivate many players to return to action; millions of dollars in salary and revenue are at stake, and the longer the hiatus continues, the more dire that situation gets. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement was not built for a pandemic or an extended hiatus of this nature, which puts everyone’s welfare at stake.

Even so, no amount of financial strain would justify a hasty decision to return to action if an NBA player, coach or staffer got seriously sick or –God forbid — died. The league is already operating under the premise that someone testing positive in the bubble is inevitable, which unleashes an avalanche of followup questions.

What will the NBA do when someone tests positive? Simply quarantining that player for two weeks is a less than ideal solution, but shutting down the season yet again would defeat the purpose of starting it back up at all. Right now, the league seems to be treating a potentially fatal disease we’re still learning about as it continues to evolve like a two-week timeout would solve everything. Donovan Mitchell, Rudy Gobert and the other NBA players who tested positive were largely asymptomatic and fully recovered, but that doesn’t mean it’d be the same for everyone else who caught the disease, and that’s without even considering the potential long-term effects on an athlete, such as the reported respiratory issues and lung scarring we’re seeing now.

Another followup question: How often will the league test everyone in this bubble? Such a situation would require constant vigilance in the form of daily testing to prevent COVID-19 from spreading further. Imagine if even a single person caught it in a bubble housing a five-on-five contact sport and the NBA didn’t have daily tests yielding immediate results.

And assuming daily testing with a rapid turnaround for results is even possible, where would those tests come from? There’s been a shortage around the country for coronavirus testing, and even if that wasn’t the case, the ample number of tests required for an undertaking like a 16-team playoff over the course of multiple weeks would have to come out of somewhere. Wojnarowski reports the plan would be to standardize testing for all 30 teams, which is even more implausible.

As long as tests aren’t readily accessible everywhere else in this country, the NBA getting preferential treatment would be reckless. Even if their playoff bubble was located somewhere with an abundance of tests, it’d still be a terrible look for the league.

There’s also the issue of bridging the divide of liability between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). Sure, it sounds like the stars and the playoff teams want to return to action, but the NBA wouldn’t expose itself to that kind of future litigation if one of its players suffered or died due to COVID-19. The players will be going in voluntarily, but the league will want those assurances in writing to ensure they’re not liable in such a situation, at which point the NBPA would have to be very careful in how it handled the safety of its players.

And of course, none of this even addresses some of the other comparatively minor logistical concerns, like whether players’ families will be allowed to be part of the bubble, how that many people will be housed and fed without putting others at risk, and all the on-court asterisks threatening to dilute the product if a star player tests positive in the middle of the playoffs and it affected the outcome of a series.

This isn’t about politics. As much as restarting the economy is an obvious concern, it’s secondary to curbing the spread of a disease that we know relatively little about and has already killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Everyone wants NBA basketball and sports in general back. But the path there is riddled with risk, and it feels too soon to be jumping back on it just yet.

A lot can change in 2-4 weeks — just look at how quickly the suspension of all major sports started in the first place. Perhaps in 2-4 weeks we’ll have a much clearer picture of what we’re dealing with and all of this consternation will be much ado about nothing. But the list of concerns for the NBA to monitor is quite long and quite literally a matter of life and death. On a day that Dr. Anthony Fauci warned Congress that states will face serious consequences if they open too quickly, two months and a day isn’t enough time to be certain of anything.

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