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At this point, the coronavirus is, in one way or another, affecting every business and professional sports league on the planet and the NBA is going to have to make a decision regarding upcoming games and the remainder of the season.
Last week the NBA sent a memo to teams asking them to be prepared just in case the league decides to play games without fans in attendance. So the possibility of drastic changes happening has been a part of the discussion for days now, but things have ramped up at a pretty swift pace.
On Tuesday, San Francisco officials asked the Golden State Warriors to cancel games due to coronavirus, which feels like the first real domino to fall in all of this. The NBA board of governors is set to discuss several scenarios including playing games at neutral sites and even suspending games for a brief period of time due to possible restrictions on large gatherings in several cities.
ESPN’s Brian Windhorst joined Get Up on Wednesday morning and gave his opinion on the matter at hand and dropped quite the bombshell. He believes that if a player in the league were to be diagnosed with coronavirus, then the NBA would have to suspend operations.
"If a player were to be diagnosed with Coronavirus, my feel is that the [NBA] would have to suspend operations."@WindhorstESPN gives us an update on the conference call between league owners. pic.twitter.com/ciNeCVb6xf
— Get Up (@GetUpESPN) March 11, 2020
It’s one thing for leagues around the world to play games without fans in attendance, but to think that an operation like the NBA would shut down its operations for an x-amount of time is tough to wrap your head around.
The scariest part? We’re still in the extremely early stages when it comes to all of this, this is just the beginning.