NBA commissioner Adam Silver said fans should think of the upcoming All-Star Weekend in Atlanta as a “only television event”, and that they should discourage fans from traveling to the game again, which is without fans played due to the COVID-19 pandemic. .
“The message within the NBA community is that we are going to work in a mini-bubble,” Silver said in an interview with ESPN on Wednesday. “There will be no NBA features [for fans] to participate in. We appreciate their support and hope they will watch our All-Star Game on television … this is a television-only event in Atlanta. ‘
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has repeatedly discouraged fans from traveling to her city for the game and asked bars and nightclubs not to hold parties.
Nevertheless, a number of events have been planned that are allegedly related to the game. The city of Brookhaven, a suburb of Atlanta, recently made national headlines when its city council approved a measure that would extend to four hours in its pubs and restaurants over the weekend.
“I think in terms of nightlife in Atlanta, the state of Georgia has decided to keep its restaurants and clubs open,” Silver said. “It’s their right to make the decision. All we can do on behalf of the NBA is commit to them that we will in no way participate in the nightlife.
“Our players are going to be in a job quarantine protocol while they’re in Atlanta.”
Players participating in the contest and other All-Star-related competitions fly in private jets and are subject to the same improved health and safety protocols that the league has operated this season. Although several star players have publicly complained about an All-Star Weekend amid the ongoing pandemic, each of these conditions has been jointly negotiated with the National Basketball Players Association.
Silver said he appreciates the personal sacrifice everyone in the NBA has made since March 11 last year, when the league closed indefinitely after a positive test by Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert. From the players, coaches, and staff who spent months with their families completing the bubble in Lake Buena Vista, Florida last season, and the strict health and safety protocols they had to follow this season, to the NBA fans, who continued to support the league, and owners who lost billions in revenue.
“The ability to work in a pandemic required an enormous amount of shared sacrifice,” Silver said.
“The players and coaches are front and center, but there are thousands of people behind the scenes who are making it possible for the NBA to keep working. And many of them are making tremendous sacrifices in their lives. In some cases, If we work 24 hour shifts, it’s because of the nature of the PCR test we do … and travel schedules and quick decisions that need to be made in terms of contact detection and quarantine, it’s infinite.
“It really took all our collective will.”
Silver said it would take the same collective will to address the myriad challenges facing the league at this stage of the pandemic.
This week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that the state will fully reopen businesses and begin its mask mandate, with effect from March 10th. However, individual businesses can still choose to require masks.
The three NBA teams, the Dallas Mavericks, San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets, which play in Texas, will still be subject to NBA health and safety protocols to fans, just like in other states that have NBA markets – Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma – but have no mask mandates.
“We set our own standards,” Silver said. “In some cases, we have postponed public health officials. In others, we believe we need to follow a national standard.
“I also acknowledge, and this may be even more true as we go into the future, that the United States is a large country, and that it may be appropriate to have different rules in different jurisdictions. If that is the case, we hope these decisions are based on the best health and safety information in those communities.
“We will continue to work with national public health officials and local health officials to determine what it is. But so far we believe we have found the right balance. About half of our teams have supporters at this stage. We, to the best of our knowledge, have not had a single problem in terms of distribution among fans in our arena. “
In addition to the rapidly changing reopening plans across the country, the NBA will soon need to address the impact on the ability to vaccinate players, coaches and staff members, its protocols will be affected.
It will also be negotiated jointly with the players association, Silver said.
“We and the Players’ Association agree that no one should take the mandate to take the vaccine,” Silver said. “My recommendation, my strong recommendation, not only to our players, but based on all the information I have, is that people should be vaccinated.
“But I admit that these are individual decisions. I have not been vaccinated yet, but I will do so as soon as it is my turn.”
Silver pointed to a recent CDC announcement that vaccines do not need to be quarantined if they are exposed to someone with COVID-19.
“It will make a big difference in this league,” Silver said. “We have been transparent about the positive cases since the start of the season. But there is also another category of players who had to go under quarantine based on contact they had with positive players.
“I think, for example, that it would be very liberating to assume that a player who has been vaccinated does not have to be in quarantine. In addition, we have a rather complicated set of rules in place that now in many cases twice a day laboratory tests of our players to ensure that we can avoid proliferation.It may be the case that when players are vaccinated, we can relax the test schedules and thus give players more freedom.
“But I also respect that not everyone will see it the way we do. And ultimately it’s an individual decision that players have to make.”