Watching Major League Baseball’s struggles with their restart — a plan where teams played in their home parks and traveled to play each other, just like a typical season, but with more masks and no fans — has given everyone around the NBA pause.
The hope had been to play out this restarted season in the bubble/campus at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, then next season — starting in December — return to something closer to a normal season. Maybe not unlike what the MLB tried. The situation with the Marlins has shown how fragile that plan could be.
Michelle Roberts, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, told Tim Bontemps of ESPN the NBA could be back in a bubble in December if the status of the disease around the nation has not changed.
She’s right.
It’s far too early to say the NBA has shown the campus/bubble concept works, the first real game has yet to be played, and there will be more tests to the system than where Lou Williams decides to get dinner. However, so far, so good. No player has tested positive for the NBA inside the bubble (that’s why the NBA was testing players for weeks before everyone came to Orlando, then quarantining when they arrived).ub
The only way to start the next NBA season may be in a bubble (or, bubbles).“I’m not in the Trump camp in believing it’s all going to go away in two weeks, but I’m praying, praying that there will be a different set of circumstances that will allow us to play in a different way,” Roberts said. “But because I don’t know, all I know is what I know now. So it may be that, if the bubble is the way to play, then that is likely gonna be the way we play next season, if things remains as they are.
“I hope not. Because I’d like to think that people can live with their families. But I can only comment on what I know, and what I know is right now.”
The NBA has an advantage — because of the size of the rosters and the size of the court — that the MLB, NFL, and other sports do not. It’s was far from easy for the NBA to build a 22-team bubble in Orlando, but it would be a far more difficult task for the NFL to do something similar. The NBA could recreate their success, but it’s one thing to do it for an eight-game “season” and the playoffs and another entirely to do it for a season.
It’s impossible to say where we will be as a nation in combating the coronavirus come November and December. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s the danger of making predictions that far out.
But a prediction that next NBA season starts in a bubble is not outlandish.