Will Kelley and Justin Horak
Staff Writers
As New Hope-Solebury closed down in-person learning for the remainder of the school year, NBA commissioner Adam Silver suspended the 2019-2020 season due to the coronavirus outbreak. The coronavirus outbreak has affected millions of people all over the world, and is spreading rapidly across the United States each and every day, claiming some 1,000 to 3,000 lives per day.
Two All-Star players from the Utah Jazz, Ruby Gobert and Donavan Mitchell have tested positive for COVID-19. After the NBA found out that Gobert tested positive, they suspended the season four minutes later. Jazz guard Emanuel Mudiay also tested positive for the virus. Five teams have been quarantined already, and it looks like all 32 teams will be soon.
On April 6, Commissioner Adam Silver said that he has told people in the NBA that there will be no way for the league to make a decision about when it can return until May at the earliest and probably not even then. Silver said repeatedly throughout the interview that part of his hesitancy to make any sort of prediction about when, or if, the NBA would return is how much things have changed since Silver initially brought the league to a halt on March 11 after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 shortly before the Jazz were supposed to play in Oklahoma City against the Thunder.
At the time the league shut down, it initially said it would be a 30-day hiatus. NBA players will receive their full checks when the next payday for most of them arrives on April 15, even though no games will have been played for more than a month at that point. The league and the National Basketball Players Association have been in talks for weeks about the status of salaries during the NBA’s shutdown. But it will unquestionably be far longer than that if it is able to return at all.
Many NBA teams are united in hopes of encouraging the league office to push the date of the June 25 draft until no sooner than Aug. 1, sources told ESPN. For now, the NBA remains on commissioner Adam Silver’s timeline of May as the earliest that decisions on the remaining league calendar will start to be made, sources said.
