With the NBA requiring teams to close their training facilities beginning on Friday, players around the league don’t have many options left for conducting workouts, writes Tim Bontemps of ESPN.
As Bontemps explains, players have also been told not to work out at any non-team public facilities, such as health clubs, fitness centers, college facilities, or gyms. The league is essentially telling players to shut it down outside of home facilities, tweets ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. While that’s an option for some players, many live in apartments and have little to no workout equipment at home, Bontemps notes (via Twitter).
There are still ways for players to stay active, but a lack of training facilities for weeks or months could be an issue, as Lakers forward Jared Dudley pointed out on Twitter.
“If we can’t train properly for a month or two, an athlete would need at least a month starting from scratch,” Dudley wrote, when asked how much time players would need to be “game-ready” if the season resumed. “Injuries would be the biggest concern … so it all depends on this lay-off from our facilities.”
Here’s more on the coronavirus situation and the NBA’s hiatus:
- The NBA is discussing “every imaginable scenario” for restarting games, league sources tell Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer. As O’Connor outlines, some of those hypothetical scenarios include having a postseason play-in tournament replace the end of the regular season, shortening playoff series, playing games at a neutral site, and pushing back the start of next season until December or even 2021.
- Within that same article, O’Connor reports that team executives around the NBA seem to be “warming” to the idea of starting the 2020/21 regular season in December. While acknowledging that their opinions may by shifting out of necessity, O’Connor points out that this could be a good opportunity for the league to experiment with a new-look calendar, as we observed earlier this week.
- Although the Nuggets had a member of their organization test positive for COVID-19, they don’t plan on testing other players or staffers unless they show symptoms, a source tells Mike Singer of The Denver Post. According to Sam Amick of The Athletic (via Twitter), the affected person with the Nuggets followed state guidelines and was tested by means of the public system — the test wasn’t privately procured.
Didn’t giannis buy one of the buck’s old training facilities? Nobody shutting him down in his own gym.
They could make it interesting and play the games while forcing the players to keep social distancing.
James Harden has already been practicing social distancing on defense for years.