Adam Silver weighing three options for NBA restart after coronavirus

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No one knows exactly when everything will return to normal.

No one knows exactly when live sports will be played again, and under what circumstances they will be played again.

Will there be fans in the stands? Will there be no crowd? At this point, no one knows. Not even NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who spoke to ESPN's Rachel Nichols in a long, wide-ranging interview Wednesday night.

When asked if he has thought about how the NBA wil restart when the coronavirus is under control, Silver laid out three possible scenarios.

"One is, when can we restart and operate as we've known it with 19,000 fans in buildings?" Silver told Nichols. "Option two is, should we consider restarting without fans, and what would that mean? Because, presumably, if we had a group of players, and staff around them, and you could test them and follow some sort of protocol, doctors and health officials may say it's safe to play.

"A third option that we are looking at now ... the impact on the national psyche of having no sports programming on television. And one of the things we've been talking about are, are there conditions in which a group of players could compete -- maybe it's for a giant fundraiser or just the collective good of the people -- where you take a subset of players and, is there a protocol where they can be tested and quarantined and isolated in some way, and they could compete against one another? Because people are stuck at home, and I think they need a diversion. They need to be entertained."

The NBA was the first professional American sports league to suspend its season after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus last Wednesday, and Silver believes it started a domino effect with other entities.

"I think it got a lot of people's attention," Silver said (H/T Sports Illustrated).

[RELATED: How NBA could reset league]

It's going to be a while before the NBA and the other sports leagues resume play, and that gives Silver and the other leaders time to figure out how to proceed.

Silver's idea for a charity game might be difficult to put on, but he's thinking outside the box and at this point, it's not a terrible idea.

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