What are the next steps for NBA amid coronavirus outbreak, season postponement?

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As you already know, the NBA suspended its season after Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus. 

With no timeline for a potential return to action, the NBA has put a few policies into place that all of its players need to follow -- especially if they want to stay healthy.

On this week's episode of The Habershow, Tom Haberstroh is joined by Howard Beck to discuss what could be next for the NBA now that the season has been postponed. 

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Beck, and his sources, agreed that the NBA probably would cancel the remainder of the regular season and head straight to the playoffs with the standings as they are currently. 

Nobody knows for sure. I'm not even sure the league could tell us even if they were being completely straight forward, with what their thinking is I don't know if there's a plan yet. I texted a few people around the league, just to see what people's sense of it was. The best guess was that the regular season is over. Two weeks won't be enough time to be able to say the crisis is over. The regular season ends in about four weeks anyway or would have. So let's just play this out.

You shut down for three to four weeks here. You wipe out the rest of the regular season. The standings are frozen in place as is, as they were yesterday [Wednesday]. You start up the playoffs based on where things were at that moment and that's it. It will be imperfect. Teams will not have played the same number of games. Some teams will be pissed off that they were that close to a playoff berth and didn't get it or their lottery position was effected. These are extreme times and this isn't the time to quibble over stuff like that. The cleanest thing to do is say the regular season is over and if it's safe and advisable to start up again with the playoffs in mid-April as normally scheduled then you do that.

Many, like Beck, have suggested the scenario above will be what the NBA does in response to COVID-19. 

Another possibility, Beck mentions, is that the NBA reschedule all the games missed and they push everything back so that the NBA Final is played in July or August. Beck adds that it would be strange to push everything into the summer because it would throw off not only this season, but next season as well. 

If the NBA does decide to cancel the remainder of the regular season, the Boston Celtics would head into the playoffs as the third seed in the Eastern Conference and would take on the sixth-seeded Philadelphia 76ers -- which would be a tremendous matchup.

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