By Eurohoops Team/ info@eurohoops.net
NBA commissioner Adam Silver gave an interview to ESPN’s Rachel Nichols in which he discussed how the league’s suspension due to the coronavirus pandemic may have changed the schedule, possibly permanently and the thoughts on a charity game being played during the break.
Here are some parts of what Silver said on:
How will it be possible for the NBA to begin again:
“What are the conditions we need for the league to restart? I would say I’m looking at three different things. One is, when can we restart and operate as we’ve known it with 19,000 fans in buildings? … 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?”
“As I look at the options, maybe we can do this incrementally, and the first step isn’t games with thousands of people in the arenas, but maybe it is just games. Something I’ve always said is 99% of people consume our game through some sort of media platform. It’s only a tiny percentage of fans who get to see our games in arenas. So those fans who watch on television or whatever device they have are fans just like people in the arena, and maybe through new kinds of technology there are ways fans can be virtual and react to plays and make noise in the arena.”
“I’m optimistic by nature, and I want to believe that we’re going to be able to salvage at least some portions of this season,” Silver said. “I would say we have done new and creative things in the past, we experimented with this year’s All-Star Game with a unique ending. We’ve talked about play-in tournaments for going into the playoffs. There may be other things we can do with the format.
“I have heard from a lot of our players … they’re going stir-crazy, they want to play, they want to compete. Players as you know, I mean, unlike a lot of us in our positions we can just go back to what we were doing, but every player is fighting something that’s unwinnable, and that’s the aging process. So a lost year or lost portion of a season in their careers is very different from other people, so we’re gonna try by every means we can to play basketball again, but I say that the safety and health of our players is first, and our fans, which is why I don’t want to speculate more on that.
“That will be the condition upon which we can play: when public health officials give us the OK.”
The NBA season beginning on December and maybe Christmas as suggested by some club executives and owners:
“Possibly. Those are things we’re always talking about whether they’re executives at … ESPN or Warner Media, together with our regional sports networks. I will say that the conventional television calendar has changed so much, certainly since I got into this business. Prime time means something very different than it used to now that people, in essence, carry televisions around with them in their pockets.
“The summer is viewed differently than it was historically from the television standpoint, so regardless of whether we had been going through all this, it’s something that the league office together with our teams has been spending a lot of time on. And we have a lot of our team owners who are technologists, media mavens by background, and so it’s something that committees of owners and league officials have been working on a lot, especially over the last year or so.”
“I, of course, understand [de Blasio’s] point in that it’s unfortunate we’re at this position as a society where it’s triage when it comes to testing,” Silver said. “And so the fundamental issue is obviously there are insufficient tests. I’d only say in the case of the NBA, we’ve been following the
What will happen with season awards like MVP or All-NBA Team:
“I’m not there yet,” Silver said. “We’ll figure it out. I hope I’m not just in denial, but I’m just not there yet.”