Brooklyn Nets season tips off at home Dec. 22, on national TV; with 48 positive tests in NBA and future risks, could season be in jeopardy?

The Brooklyn Nets, which will be playing their one pre-season game at Barclays Center on 12/13/20, will start their season on 12/22/20 against the Golden State Warriors, as noted in the tweet below, and by NetsDaily. 

Both that debut home game, as well as the Nets' Christmas Day game in Boston against the Boston Celtics, will be nationally televised, a reflection of the expected strength of a team with superstars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving back from injuries.

The 2020-21 @NBA season begins in Brooklyn.

Y'all ready? pic.twitter.com/S7KmUp0Ydz

— Brooklyn Nets (@BrooklynNets) December 2, 2020

Pandemic questions

The game is not open to fans, and presumably subject to safety protocols. That said, as CBS reported yesterday:

The NBA tested 546 players for COVID-19 during the period from Nov. 24-30, and the results were not overly positive. Of those 546, 48 tested positive, the NBA and NBPA announced in a joint statement Wednesday. That is a positivity rate of 8.8 percent, below the 10.2 percent national average, according to Johns Hopkins. Still, the contrast between that percentage and what the NBA just experienced in its Orlando bubble is substantial. Once the season resumed at Disney, the league did not experience a single positive test in the bubble.

This NBA season is no sure thing, TrueHoop's Henry Abbott wrote (paywall) yesterday, noting that the league had refused to answer his questions about protocols:

The NBA has been a national model of COVID prevention—for the period during the bubble. But before and after that, it has been about like everybody else. Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Donovan Mitchell, Nikola Jokic, Bam Adebayo, Rudy Gobert … dozens and dozens of people who work for NBA teams have already gotten COVID. Many seem fine now. Are all of them?

...I know of at least one current NBA player who believes he was perfectly safe quarantining at home, but got the virus by reporting for duty at the team’s practice facility, where he felt he saw sloppy enforcement of COVID protocols, and eventually tested positive.

Noting that the NBA will be more like the NFL, which has seen games postponed, Abbott added that, "In an ordinary world, the Centers for Disease Control or the federal government would be the ones to shut it down before the risks grew grotesque." 

He wondered whether any local health officials and mayors will take measures, and concluded:

What a tremendous hassle it will be for everyone if the 2020-2021 NBA season doesn’t happen as planned. What a sad endnote to a heartbreaking 2020. And so much better than being grotesque.

That use of "grotesque" referred to the notion of Roman gladiators, "slaves, dying for the amusement of the wealthy and politically connected." Now, NBA players aren't slaves, but they do have financial incentive to play. Then again, the team owners and the league have even more incentive.