Adam Silver mulls diversion game for a giant fundraiser or just collective good of people

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver spoke with Rachel Nichols on ESPN about the future of the NBA season which is in hiatus due to the coronavirus outbreak in USA.

Per ESPN, “What are the conditions we need for the league to restart? I would say I’m looking at three different things,” Silver told Nichols. “One is, when can we restart and operate as we’ve known it with 19,000 fans in buildings? … Option two is, should we consider restarting without fans, and what would that mean? Because, presumably, if we had a group of players, and staff around them, and you could test them and follow some sort of protocol, doctors and health officials may say it’s safe to play.
“A third option that we are looking at now … the impact on the national psyche of having no sports programming on television. And one of the things we’ve been talking about are, are there conditions in which a group of players could compete — maybe it’s for a giant fundraiser or just the collective good of the people — where you take a subset of players and, is there a protocol where they can be tested and quarantined and isolated in some way, and they could compete against one another?
“Because people are stuck at home, and I think they need a diversion. They need to be entertained.”

“I’m optimistic by nature, and I want to believe that we’re going to be able to salvage at least some portions of this season,” Silver said. “I would say we have done new and creative things in the past, we experimented with this year’s All-Star Game with a unique ending. We’ve talked about play-in tournaments for going into the playoffs. There may be other things we can do with the format.
“I have heard from a lot of our players … they’re going stir-crazy, they want to play, they want to compete. Players as you know, I mean, unlike a lot of us in our positions we can just go back to what we were doing, but every player is fighting something that’s unwinnable, and that’s the aging process. So a lost year or lost portion of a season in their careers is very different from other people, so we’re gonna try by every means we can to play basketball again, but I say that the safety and health of our players is first, and our fans, which is why I don’t want to speculate more on that.
“That will be the condition upon which we can play: when public health officials give us the OK.”