OTD: The NBA Suspended the Season

By Adam Roberts – 3/11/2021

Tonight at the Fiserv Forum, the Milwaukee Bucks will take the floor against the New York Knicks to begin the second half of their season. Exactly one year ago this evening, the sports world, and in a much larger context American life, came to a screeching halt.

Over 20 teams are hitting the court today on the one-year anniversary of the NBA shutdown. It was on this day last year that the league stopped playing due to multiple players, namely Rudy Gobert, testing positive for COVID-19 outbreak. ESPN Radio and a lot of other media outlets are reflecting today on the magnitude of the day league commissioner Adam Silver suspended the season. Prior to that point, the pandemic, which had only been officially ruled a pandemic by the CDC one day prior, still seemed in many Americans’ minds to be sensationalism, something that would take the form of the SARS pandemic from a decade and a half before, or bird flu, ebola, or the Zika virus. One year later, sports and nearly every element of our day-to-day life has been remolded to fight against the virus, and there will likely be things that never truly go back to pre-pandemic ways.

Still, with one of the largest vaccine rollouts in history continuing along and states slowly starting to resume some semblance of normalcy, there are at least signs that the elusive light at the end of a seemingly never-ending tunnel may be approaching. It certainly seems like it anyways with 22 teams playing in eleven games as the NBA begins the second half of the season.