By Johnny Askounis/ info@eurohoops.net
During Wednesday’s conference call with international media, NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum touched on the potential impact the NBA bubble in Orlando can have on the Olympic Games.
“I have not been directly in contact with the IOC, but as you may or may not know, I am on the executive committee of FIBA, and obviously FIBA has been in direct contact with the IOC,” he replied to a question on NBA being in direct contact with the International Olympic Committee, “Andreas Zagklis and I speak every week, and we actually have our chief medical officer on FIBA’s medical commission, and so there’s a lot of sharing of information about our NBA campus and the bubble environment that I know is being shared with the IOC, as well.”
The 2020 Olympic Games were moved to the 2021 summer but the 2019-20 NBA season is set to officially resume tonight, Thursday. The 22 teams gathered in the Orlando bubble will follow up previous scrimmages with eight seeding matches and the top eight from both conferences will then progress to a conventional postseason tournament.
“One of the, I think, benefits of this entire pandemic over the last couple of months has been the coming together of the sport’s community. There’s been a tremendous amount of sharing amongst leagues,” he added, “I remember with the Bundesliga when they created their protocols, I was on the phone with them on a regular basis, and we shared information and shared protocols together. We were, again, talking to the CBA. We were talking to the Premier League, the English Premier League. We all spoke about how we could do this together and what’s the best way to do it.”
As sports are steadily attempting a restart, Tatum underlined how important a successful effort will be through the coronavirus pandemic heavily impacting daily routines for people all around the world.
“In this particular scenario, we were not competing with each other, but we were competing together to fight the coronavirus, and I think if there are learnings here that we can share with others so that we can create safe and healthy environments for athletes and for sport,” he furthered, “We’re all for it. We’re all for it because I think that the world is a better place when there are sports when there’s competition, and we have a collective responsibility to be able to do it in a safe and healthy way. So that’s my hope.”