With NBA plans seemingly on track, is basketball coming back too soon? Well, teams are "sports entertainment corporations."

It looks like the NBA is on its way to a partial restart at Disney World in Orlando, despite reasons for doubt, given that lack of major progress--like a treatment or cure-on the coronavirus.

Majority of NBA GMs vote to restart season by going straight to playoffs, ESPN's Tim Bontemps wrote yesterday, but that was just 16 out of 30 general managers. Five backed a different version of the playoffs, while nine voted to finish the season.

No one agreed on when the season could end--as early as Labor Day and as late as November 1., with a small plurality--nine votes--for October 1.

Sources: NBA board of governors expected to approve [Commissioner] Adam Silver's restart plan Thursday, ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski and Ramona Shelburne reported later yesterday, describing a plan for 22 of 30 teams to return, with regular-season games included.

More games, of course, means more revenues.

If the bottom eight teams are eliminated, the Brooklyn Nets are in, the New York Knicks are out. Here are the standings.

Too soon?

If most public discussion includes players' desire to return, NBC reported yesterday that Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter said "he’s been told by a former teammate that at least one All-Star-caliber player in the Eastern Conference is leery of returning until a vaccine exists to combat the coronavirus pandemic."

If that's thirdhand, it has the ring of truth to me: there's a spectrum of caution among the public.

Basketball Was Made to Be Played Indoors. Now That’s the Problem., the Wall Street Journal's Ben Cohen wrote 5/20/20:

A basketball court is more like a crowded bar than a socially distanced baseball field—and that makes each game a potential breeding ground for disease. The basics of the sport have never looked so risky. There is physical contact on every play. The ball is touched so many times by so many hands that it might as well be a doorknob. The best teams are in constant vocal communication as they talk with each other, talk trash at opponents and talk down to referees.

In other words, the margin for error is is tiny.

Sports = business

In a 5/25/20 Wall Street Journal article, Why the Sports Comeback Has Begun, Cohen and Louise Radnofsky suggested that the sports leagues' plans accept "that some players may be infected—and a belief that leagues should focus on limiting potential outbreaks."

But even that article acknowledges that sequestering basketball players and personnel "can't do much about the inherent dangers of a game designed to be played indoors."

"We need that release," said the always quotable Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Well, let's say what he says if the NBA return becomes a clusterf**k.

The N.B.A. May Return Too Soon, wrote New York Times columnist Marc Stein (published in print 5/28/20 as "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"), noting the risks of indoor play:

A general manager asked me the other day to make a case that the N.B.A. world feels appreciably safer than it did on March 11 when Silver suspended operations. It’s a subjective question, to be sure, but I couldn’t muster much pushback to the G.M.’s argument that money reasons are the only reasons to support resuming the season now. 

The league’s go-to counter to such claims is that conditions are unlikely to be safer in October, November and December than they are now — and that it could be catastrophic financially for all sides in the sport to delay a return when safety assurances don’t appear to be coming any time soon. 

In other words, it's about money. I'm reminded of that piquant description of teams by subsidy skeptic Bettina Damiani: "sports entertainment corporations." Her 2007 Congressional testimony seems painfully apt, contrasting teams with "public goods like parks, water and transit":

Always disturbed to see how many sports fans are not just willing but pathetically eager to lick the boots of billionaire owners. Being a useful idiot isn’t the first stage of becoming a plutocrat; it’s the last stage of ensuring you’ll never be anything *but* a useful idiot.

— Jason Fry (@jasoncfry) May 28, 2020

Update

David Aldridge in The Athletic, 5/29/20, As NBA talks about restarting, questions abound on options and what really matters, found most of those associated with the league eager to get back to playing, but found himself more wary. His closing:

Girlfriends, drug testing … there are so many potential minefields. One bad encounter at a WWoS checkpoint for a player, or a player’s family member. One false-negative test. One real positive test for an older coach, or ref — or, for that matter, a busboy at one of the restaurants. Will there be enough contact tracing in place to know who else someone with a positive coronavirus test has been around?
And: what if … someone dies because they went into that environment? Or someone who was healthy in that environment gets sick or dies because they were exposed to someone who wasn’t?
How can you say your “need” for NBA or NFL or college football or hoops is worth that?
Someone dying from the virus isn’t the same as all the deaths of all these black people at the hands of law enforcement, or vigilantes. But they’re all horrific, a stain on the national soul. And they’re all running together in my head, the lines between them blurry, the need to stop them as soon as possible paramount. I turn to the Sports Industrial Complex for comfort; I run away from it, in shame.