Every day in the NBA there is a lot to unpack, so every weekday during the NBA regular season we are here to help you break it all down. Here are three things you need to know from yesterday in the NBA.
1) The strangest day in NBA history ends with NBA suspending play indefinitely. For much of Wednesday, NBA owners and the league office were debating how to keep the games on track as the spread of the novel coronavirus grew in the United States. There were discussions of playing in mostly empty arenas without fans — that’s the way most owners seemed to lean, except James Dolan and a couple of others who reportedly wanted business as usual — while discussions of moving games to new locations and even hitting the pause button on the season were thrown out there.
Then Utah’s Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19.
A player testing positive was always the league’s worst-case scenario. It changed everything.
At that point the league did the only thing it could: It suspended play.
“The NBA is suspending game play following the conclusion of tonight’s schedule of games until further notice,” the league said in a statement. “The NBA will use this hiatus to determine next steps for moving forward in regard to the coronavirus pandemic.”
“This isn’t about basketball…" Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said later in a press conference. “This is a pandemic, a global pandemic, where people’s lives are at stake, and I’m a lot more worried about my kids, and my mom who’s 82 years old, and talking to her and telling her to stay in the house, than I am about when we play our next game.”
Now we all wait. There are a lot of questions currently without answers. We now know Donovan Mitchell tested positive, but does any other player in the league have the virus? Will play restart this season? If so, when? Will the season be pushed back into the summer? Will the season be shortened? Could the league just go straight to the playoffs in mid-April? Will fans be allowed to gather in large numbers when the league does return, or will the league play in empty arenas just to get games back up on television? How will this impact team revenues, and by extension the salary cap for next season?
All of those questions are tied to things bigger than the league, they are intertwined with the spread of the virus through the United States, which is expected to get worse before it gets better. The lack of testing from the outset — combined with bury your head in the sand leadership from some in power — has given us all an incomplete picture of how widespread the disease is in our nation. Nobody knows exactly what we are dealing with, which makes it even harder to predict what is next.
What matters most is the health of the players, fans, and everyone around the NBA. Gobert is said to be doing well, and that is to be expected — the young and healthy largely fall in the 80 percent of people who get a mild form of the disease. The goal is to stop community spread, to flatten the curve with the disease. The goal is to keep Gobert or another player from passing the virus on to a kid they took a picture with at a game, and that young boy or girl goes and sees his grandmother two days later, and suddenly the virus finds its way to someone far more vulnerable to it.
It will be, at the least, weeks before the NBA resumes play. Right now, teams that played against Gobert and the Jazz are in self-quarantine for that long.
The NBA got it right in shutting everything down.
Now comes the hard part of waiting while team owners, the league, the players union and everyone else gets involved in figuring out what happens next. This is uncharted territory.
2) Rick Carlisle reacted to the suspension news like a competitor. Dallas headed into the final few weeks of the season looking to improve their playoff positioning. As the standings look at the time of the suspension of play, Dallas would get the Los Angeles Clippers in the first round. Understandably, they would like to move up a spot or two and get Denver or Houston or anyone else instead.
So what was Carlise’s reaction when he heard play would be suspended after Wednesday night?
Rick Carlisle’s immediate reaction to learning the season was suspended: “My thoughts were we need to win this f—ing game.”
— Tim MacMahon (@espn_macmahon) March 12, 2020
They did — knocking off Denver behind an improbable career night from Boban Marjanovic, who had 31 points and 17 rebounds. For once, Carlisle didn’t have to worry about keeping him fresh for the next game, so he just unleashed Boban in all his glory.
As a Boban stan, I am saddened more people will not notice his big night.
3) Wednesday night may have been the end of Vince Carter’s career, and he understands that. Vince Carter played his 22nd NBA season in Atlanta this year, mentoring young stars such as Trae Young and John Collins, and knocking down some shots.
With full knowledge that the season was going to be suspended and this could be the final game of his career, Carter entered Wednesday night’s game against the Knicks in overtime and promptly knocked down a three.
Postgame Carter spoke to the media for nearly 20 minutes, with everyone understanding this could be his farewell to the sport (if the league goes straight to the playoffs when it returns he will not play again).
Thank you, Vince Carter, for 22 seasons of bringing us the joy of the game.
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