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The Chines government issued a new order on Tuesday to delay the restart of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) and all other group sporting events in the country.
This is not great news for sports leagues around North America.
The Chinese Government issued a new order today restricting resumption of team sports, a heavy blow for pro basketball to return there soon as was planned. China's attempt to restart sports are being watched closely by leagues across the world. Huge issue is asymptomatic carriers
— Brian Windhorst (@WindhorstESPN) March 31, 2020
The CBA has been shut down since January and despite the spread of ‘The Big Cancel’ slowing down in China, they have still elected to delay the restart of sports. While you can sit back and say that the U.S. isn’t related to China and the status of the disease on the other side of the world, with numbers continuing to rise around the U.S. this particular news certainly can’t be taken as any sort of positive.
According to ESPN, the CBA had been making plans to split the 20 teams in the league, send them to two cities and play remaining games in empty arenas. It’s recently been reported that the NBA was considering doing something similar, but no possible timeframe has been mentioned.
The CBA planned to house teams in quarantined hotels with multiple temperature checks per day to try to avoid the risk of exposure and spread of the virus. More than a dozen American players, including Jeremy Lin and Lance Stephenson, returned to China within the past two weeks to start a 14-day quarantine with the expectation the season could begin soon.
There is no denying that every sports league around the world is going to try to resume or begin their regular operations as soon as possible, even if that means no in-person fans, but given this latest report out of China, there is still nothing close to a legitimate timetable as to when sports may return to our lives.