NBA League Officials Will Allow Teams In States Not Heavily Impacted By Covid-19 To Open Team Facilities To Players

Starting May 1, the NBA will reportedly begin allowing practice facilities to open up to players.

Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reports that teams that are in states with ease stay-home restrictions caused by the current health crisis will be allowed to open facilities.

The facilities that are allowed to open will be for individual workouts, and team workouts will be not prohibited Wojnarowski added.

League officials are working out plans with teams like New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans that are heavily impacted by COVID-19; to allow individual workouts at team facilities.

It’s still unclear if the NBA 2019-20 season will resume. Brian Windhorst of ESPN’s reported earlier in the month that NBA teams have asked for a minimum of 25-days for teams to get back into game shape. It’s not for certain that the opening of practice facilities for individual workouts is a start to the resuming process.

Detail discussions on how and when to resume the NBA season will not begin until May 1, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier in April.

Silver added, “Because we operate in so many different jurisdictions, we have to pay close attention to the different rules, state by state, city by city. But we are, at the end of the day, a national league, so we feel it is incumbent on us to set what we think are the right standards for our players,” Silver said. “We will be influenced by what municipalities do. We’re taking in all data. It’s not just our so-called experts we’re listening to. We view the counsel with the other leagues as an opportunity to listen and learn from colleagues, and from whatever outside resources they have available to them. But I think it’s clear in order to operate a league, other than maybe in some interim way; you need a consistent national set of standards.”

Before the March 11 suspension, teams had played a different amount of games, so the league may discuss ways to play out the remainder of the games or have play-in games to make it into the playoffs.

If the 2019-20 season does resume, the Milwaukee Bucks (53-12) will be the top seed in the Eastern Conference, while the Los Angeles Lakers (49-14) will hold the top spot out West.