LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The N.B.A. was rooting hard for Major League Baseball.
Any league that hopes to return to something resembling standard operations next season was pulling for baseball to flourish in its attempt to stage a 60-game season in which teams allowed players to go home during homestands and travel as they normally do for road trips. M.L.B.’s concept lasted only a few days before a coronavirus outbreak ripped through the Miami Marlins.
The instant crisis left the unmistakable impression throughout the N.B.A. campus at Walt Disney World that a “bubble” approach is the only kind that can work for team sports in the Covid-19 era — at least for the foreseeable future. The N.B.A. hasn’t announced positive tests for anyone on campus who had been released from quarantine, but concern about what baseball’s woes mean for next season is mounting, even amid the relative prosperity of the league’s three-week run in its Florida bubble.
We will be coming back often to the topic of the N.B.A.’s future, but the league’s present, at last, is poised to deliver meaningful basketball that demands our focus. The full force of the N.B.A. restart hits Thursday — 141 days after the Dallas Mavericks secured a 113-97 victory over the Denver Nuggets on March 11 in the last game completed before the season was suspended.
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“We don’t know if this is going to work or not, but I think the league has given us every chance for this to work,” Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said. “If we do it right, we have a shot at it.”