Will the Blazers really have a season?
The National Basketball Association is planning to start a "regular" season on Christmas, with each team playing 72 games, followed by playoffs. But unlike the last, abbreviated season that ended a couple of months ago, this time around they aren't planning to sequester everyone involved in a protective "bubble." The plan is to have the teams travel and play all over the country in the usual arenas, with few or no spectators present. Pre-season games are supposed to start this week. Players are supposed to stay out of bars and nightclubs for the duration.
The league's plan has never sounded realistic to me, and the latest news from the Portland Trail Blazers makes me even more skeptical. The team has had to close its practice facility because three "members of the organization" have tested positive for Covid. They're not saying who the "members" are. They might be players, they might be coaches, they might be ball boys.
In Sacramento, two players are out with positive tests. Their team, the Kings, is supposed to play the Blazers here in Portland on Friday. As of last week, 48 players around the league had tested positive.
The "bubble" season was fun to watch, and the whole league is to be commended on how it pulled it off. But what they're proposing now seems like the kind of wishful thinking that is getting thousands of people killed.
Football has given the rest of sports the template for doing this. The NBA will absolutely play this season. The "billionaires" need the cash, starting with Lacob at Golden State. That guy's going to bully state AND local government into letting him have fans in his brand new arena this season. The guy in Houston took out a loan at usury rates back in the spring, hoping things would be better by now. HE needs money. There are teams out there very quietly for sale because their owners don't have money.
ReplyDeleteSilver will do as he's told and bully his way through this, because only one thing matters in professional sports...and it ain't winning.
Maybe more sports owners could learn from the wisdom of Baker Mayfield. Some sports reporters asked him how he turned his situation around and he said,
ReplyDelete"Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?' And if they would, then I don't do that."