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Photo: AP – Scanpix
AP Photo – Scanpix
Exactly one year ago, basketball around the world came to a halt. The morning of March 12 in Europe, the United States ended on March 11, when a positive test from Rudy Gobert forced NBA leaders to take an unimaginable step: suspend the entire league.
Coronavirus was already a well-known term back then, but it is still not as integral to the word of every dialogue as it has become in the next few days. Until the NBA ruling, it didn’t seem like basketball could stop at all.
There has been talk for weeks that something will have to change, but no one could have imagined how much it would change.
In Italy, whose northern city of Milan has become the hotbed of the virus in Europe, already in 2020. At the end of February the decision was made to play football matches without spectators.
In the context of this decision, when the Milan Armani Exchange team arrived in Kaunas on February 27, their head coach Ettore Messina was upset when journalists asked him about the virus situation in Italy and joked unsuccessfully that if his team is left behind the next day, he will start coughing.
At the time, it seemed like a joke to many, but some 6,000 Žalgiris fans decided not to go to the arena the next day.
However, in the duel with the Chimki arena in the Moscow region, which took place three days later, Nemunas Island was almost full again. The virus then seemed like a distant problem in some region: first it was China, then Milan, and until it was present, everything was fine.
On the same afternoon of March 3 in Milan, the Euroleague match between the local club and Real Madrid was already being played without spectators, but there was also a joke against him: Pablo Laso joked that the masks “could be made of napkins and rubber bands. “as medical prices became more expensive and the sponsors did nothing.
Rudy Gobert also showed a kind of humor a week later, demonstratively grabbing the table microphones after the press conference.
Even when the NBA championship was suspended a couple of days later for Goberto himself, it seemed that in a couple of weeks, a month at most, it was all over.
The jokes are jokes, but even for people with more information or experience, it was difficult to imagine the scale of the pandemic.
“There is a popular book by Ernest Becker called ‘Denial of Death,'” ESPN quotes NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. – We all act like this doesn’t happen to us. That is why we are moving forward, isn’t it? “
The NBA was already considering various future scenarios at the time, and the Golden State Warriors had decided to play their home game on March 12 with no spectators. But things fell apart the day before.
A visit by the Jazz team to Oklahoma, where they were to play with the Thunder team, just before the game, revealed that Gobert’s coronavirus test was positive. The fact was not yet made public when top officials discussed it: Thunder owner Clay Bennett called Silver, and Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt was soon interviewed.
The match was supposed to start in a few minutes, but it was quickly decided to cancel it. An hour later, the season stopped.
And even then, Silver did not imagine that this was only the beginning.
“I thought that we would stop for 30 days, we would establish new procedures, standards and protocols that would allow us to continue the season with the fans. We knew so little on March 11, “Silveris quoted ESPN as saying.
In Europe, it dawned on March 12, when the decision to suspend the NBA season sounded like a gong heralding disaster.
“Žalgiris” met in the arena that morning, where coach Šarūnas Jasikevičius spoke to journalists and was preparing to fly to Barcelona, where he expected the next Euroleague game the next day.
Only the bus, which was supposed to take the team from the arena to the airport, did not take this route that day. Following the lead of the NBA, the Euroleague leaders have announced a season halt.
At the time, no one suspected that the strongest team in Europe in 2020 would not be determined. Two months later, the Euroleague announced that it no longer saw any possibility of extending the season and it was canceled.
The NBA, meanwhile, has made a plan to end the season with a bubble run in Orlando and begin on July 31. early October 2020. champions.
Exactly a year has passed since the day the basketball stopped, it seems to have been a lot more than 365 days.
Longer or shorter quarantines, released and reinforced again, limit people’s lives, but basketball is trying to get back on track.
The previous NBA season was not over when the Euroleague started the fights this season, but it often seems that these two leagues still go hand in hand. The first rounds of the Euroleague raised questions about whether such a season would be possible at all: due to coronavirus cases, matches were postponed in teams or teams had to play heavily bleeding.
When the NBA began its season in December, the same thing happened there: the postponement of the game and the number of players found in self-isolation threatened the good development of the season.
And yet, a year after that black day, basketball continues on. Basketball players are constantly tested, they live in hallway mode, but basketball is alive.
With just over half of the NBA teams hosting a limited number of fans, the Euroleague has always been the freest in this regard in the Euroleague, and now the gates of Turkey’s stadiums and Israel’s quick graft. they are opening little by little.
The 2020-2021 season is slowly but surely approaching its climax, there is hope that perhaps the next season will be at least a little more similar to what we are used to seeing.
We still don’t know anything, but at the same time we know a lot more than a year ago.
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