First domino to fall when, last March, the decision to suspend the season after the positive test of Frenchman Rudy Gobert for Covid-19 launched the stop of world sport, the NBA (National Basketball Association) begins a new season on Tuesday 22 December. Two months after the coronation of the Los Angeles Lakers by LeBron James in the health bubble established in the Disney World complex in Orlando (Florida), the North American basketball league is relaunching its match in the face of the pandemic.
Set up as a model, in particular by the Football Champions League, for having kept the virus away from its bubble – no positive case in two and a half months in Orlando – the NBA wants to keep one step ahead of the SARS-CoV -2. “What we have achieved is a message for the whole country, said Adam Silver, the boss of the League, at the end of September. The protocols we followed work, we have shown that we can find a balance between public health and economic needs. “
These necessities – “Tens of thousands of jobs depend on our league”, recalled the commissionaire, Monday, in USA Today – encouraged the NBA to come out of its bubble for the new season. If the Florida closed door has allowed it to save the furniture and the substantial windfall of television rights, its cost and the remoteness of families that it involves have made it impossible to consider it over an entire season, despite a pandemic galloping in the United States.
Especially since, like the whole of professional sport, the NBA wishes to bring its audience as quickly as possible to its huge venues: it anticipates losses of 40% of its income – around $ 4 billion (about $ 3.3 billion euros) – for the coming season in case of closed session. Several scenarios are developed (sometimes involving the implementation of rapid results tests for the public). But at the start of the season, only six of the thirty teams in the league plan to welcome a small number of spectators.
Risky sport
The NBA relies on daily tests of all players and strict compliance with health protocol. A memo of nearly 160 pages was sent to the franchises to govern the season and protect themselves as much as possible from contamination. If current discussions envisage a general vaccination of all the NBA barnum, Adam Silver specified, Monday, with the ESPN channel, exclude that his organization enjoys privileges concerning the obtaining of vaccines.
Spending a good part of the season traveling – 82 regular season team games in normal times, 72 this year – the players have escaped strict confinement in their hotel rooms. But the league has banned any outing to bars, clubs, gyms and many other indoor venues. It will not hesitate to sanction clubs or players whose behavior would jeopardize the progress of the season.
Because it’s hard to imagine this happening without the slightest positive case. Indoor sport multiplying contacts and matches – up to four per week – the NBA knows it is more at risk than other professional sports. And only released the first half of its schedule, until early March, to maintain flexibility in the event of a pandemic-related disruption.
“We know that following the protocol does not mean that we will have no case, conceded David Weiss, the league’s vice president for player health, when asked by the New York Times. We will have to be vigilant, we will face dips and bumps, but so far we are optimistic about our chances of going through them. ” Back in the real world, far from the hermetic walls of its bubble, the North American basketball league aspires to bounce back.
