Sports Teams in the Bubble

I remember in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, it felt like each day we were hit with momentous changes and cancellations like we’ve never seen before. The one announcement that really hit me hard happened on March 12, when the NCAA announced the cancellation of the Division 1 Men’s and Women’s basketball championship tournaments, also known as March Madness. March Madness is an event that brings people together every year by having people filling out brackets, turning them into die-hard fans for colleges and universities that they may have never even heard of. It was at this moment that I realized, “Damn, this whole coronavirus thing must be really serious if March Madness just got cancelled”. Another major cancellation was the NBA, who also cancelled their season mid-March, with the playoffs set to begin mid-April. Once this happened, I thought that I wouldn’t be seeing sports games for a long time, and athletes came out saying that they wouldn’t play without fans in attendance. However, after months of quarantining, many opinions changed, including those of athletes who now just wanted to play, with or without fans. After more than 100 days of quarantine, the NBA announced that the season would resume in July, at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, and that all the teams and staff would be in a bubble. This announcement came along with a 100-page safety plan put out by the NBA, with specific guidelines for how they would finish the season as safely as possible. Players stayed in hotels all in separate rooms, and a mandatory 48-hour quarantine was enforced upon their arrival. These players were not allowed to have visitors of any kind, including their family, for months. Some players got caught trying to sneak girls up to their rooms, and were punished by their teams accordingly. Many players started streaming on Twitch to pass the time, including Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker. These games had no fans in attendance, but instead, had a big wall which projected live streams of people watching the game at home from their computers. I understand why the league did this, but I thought it was a pretty weird touch. The stadiums would pump in artificial crowd noise, which also didn’t feel right at all, but looking back, I’m glad they did it, because watching these games in complete silence would have been spooky. After the first couple weeks of the bubble, players and fans started getting used to it, and I think the rest of the playoffs went smoothly. So smooth in fact, that there was not one positive case of coronavirus reported throughout the entirety of the bubble. This is truly an impressive stat, especially now that we are seeing NFL and NCAA football games seemingly being cancelled every week due to a large number of cases. While it wasn’t perfect, I believe there is a lot that other sports leagues can learn from the NBA bubble, and moving forward, I bet that other leagues will implement similar strategies to handle their seasons and post-seasons.