By Dan Woike
Los Angeles Times
The NBA is suspending the 2019-20 season. The announcement came after a player for the Utah Jazz tested positive for the coronavirus.
The league announced the decision, which will go into effect after Wednesday night’s games, following a bizarre scene in Oklahoma City, where a game between the Thunder and the Utah Jazz was delayed seconds before tipoff and canceled 35 minutes later.
“The NBA announced that a player on the Utah Jazz has preliminarily tested positive for COVID-19. The test result was reported shortly prior to the tipoff of tonight’s game between the Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder at Chesapeake Energy Arena. At that time, tonight’s game was canceled. The affected player was not in the arena,” the league said in a statement.
“The NBA is suspending game play following the conclusion of tonight’s schedule of games until further notice. The NBA will use this hiatus to determine next steps for moving forward in regard to the coronavirus pandemic.”
According to the Athletic, All-Star center Rudy Gobert of Utah is the player in question. In a bizarre scene captured by some reporters earlier this week, Gobert ended a news conference by touching all the microphones and recording devices in front of him.
Rick Welts, the Warriors’ president and chief operating officer, told reporters Wednesday that not playing a game will lead to a “multi-million dollar loss.” Player compensation will be affected because basketball-related income drives the NBA’s salary cap. Those hit hardest, Welts added, will be the 1,500 part-time employees who work home games.
“We do have a number of people who live paycheck to paycheck who will be impacted,” Welts said.
The announcement of the suspension of play came after an NBA conference call with its governors and owners Wednesday afternoon amid the growing spread of coronavirus in the United States. With governing bodies of sports around the world canceling, postponing and playing games with no fans, as the NCAA also decided to do, the consensus among NBA owners was that games would likely be played in empty arenas.
The governors’ discussion Wednesday came after the city of San Francisco banned all public gatherings of more than 1,000 people, which triggered the Golden State Warriors announcement that Thursday’s game at Chase Center in downtown San Francisco will be played without fans in the building.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban held a news conference after his club defeated the Denver Nuggets on Wednesday.
“The NBA has hired people with expertise in those areas and they’re working with people from the government and other people with expertise so we have to defer to them and that’s exactly what we did,” he said of postponing the season. “I think the NBA made the right decision.”
When pressed for his opinion, Cuban responded, “When it’s something this critical with people’s health and safety and fans and customers is at stake, I didn’t have an opinion.”
Miami Heat coach agreed with the decision to suspend the season.
“It’s a very serious time right now,” Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “I think the league moved appropriately and prudently and we’ll all just have to monitor the situation and see where it goes from here.”
