NBA facilities will begin to reopen Friday. What does it mean for the Heat?
All NBA facilities have been closed to players and staff since March 20 amid the coronavirus pandemic.
But that’s about to change, as the NBA is planning to allow teams to open their practice facilities to players beginning on Friday in cities and states where local governments have loosened stay-at-home orders. According to ESPN, group workouts will still be prohibited, but teams will be allowed to make facilities open to players on a voluntary basis for individual work.
For those teams in cities where stay-at-home orders still keep practice facilities closed, the NBA will work to find “alternative arrangements” for players, according to the Associated Press. While the reopening of league facilities is a step in the right direction, it’s still unknown whether the remainder of the 2019-20 NBA season will be played.
As of Sunday, it was unclear whether the Miami Heat would be one of the teams allowed to open its practice facilities to players on Friday based on orders implemented by the local government.
“From what we have heard so far, the NBA’s intention is to begin allowing INDIVIDUAL player workouts at team facilities,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s Office of Communications said in a statement sent to the Miami Herald on Sunday. “As of right now, under current orders, the AmericanAirlines Arena is closed. But, we have until Friday to gather information on what the NBA plans are and to work with the Miami Heat on what could be possible, safe and acceptable.”
Parks and gyms remain closed across Miami-Dade and the city of Miami, but the tentative plan is to ease closure orders in the coming days for parks, marinas and golf courses across the county. This would allow for basketball at parks with no more than three players per half court, only for shooting and no pick-up games, and each player must have their own ball.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday: “We’re not doing in-person sports yet no matter what. That’s just not going to happen in May.” But professional wrestling was deemed an essential business by the state earlier this month to allow the WWE to continue taping and airing live from an empty performance center near Orlando, and individual basketball workouts in an empty practice facility could satisfy social distancing requirements depending on local orders.
In fact, Florida has all of professional sports on its list of allowable “essential services.”
“Employees at a professional sports and media production with a national audience — including any athletes, entertainers, production team, executive team, media team and any others necessary to facilitate including services supporting such production — fall under “essential,” according to Jared Moskowitz, the state coordinating officer for the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
With the facilities at AmericanAirlines Arena closed for the last month, Heat players have relied on team workouts via the Zoom remote conferencing platform. Heat head strength and conditioning coach Eric Foran leads five team workouts per week through Zoom that last between 60 and 90 minutes.
“We’re, obviously, right now not going to stay in NBA competitive shape,” Foran said. “It’s not like we’re playing basketball and having games every day and practice every day. So we’re going to expect that everybody is taking a little bit of a step back. But as close as we can stay to that, we want to make it a little easier of a transition when we do come back. That it’s a little bit easier and safer to get here. We don’t want to start from ground zero again.”
In addition, All-Star wing Jimmy Butler had portable basketball hoops sent to each Heat player and coach as they wait out the NBA hiatus.
“We got together with our players for two, three straight days ... and then we got the news that we had to shut down all the facilities and everything,” Heat president Pat Riley said in a video posted Friday to the Heat’s various social media platforms, representing his first public comments since the NBA season was suspended on March 11. “From that point on, we simply started to develop a strategy to stay connected with our players, to engage our players, to send out memos to them.
“I think coach [Erik Spoelstra] Spo and [head strength and conditioning coach] Eric Foran and the whole staff, downstairs [head athletic trainer] Jay Sabol and his group have done an incredible job of conditioning our players with the Zoom videos four or five days a week, sending out letters, sending out motivational statements, Jay Sabol checking in every single night with our guys to see if they’re OK. We’ve been monitoring that as we can.”
During a conference call with reporters on April 17, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league is “not ready to set a date of how long we can wait before we can no longer continue the season. Everything is on the table, including potentially delaying the start of next season. We are not in position to make any decisions [about the status of this season] and it’s unclear when we will be. We still don’t have enough information to make a decision.”
Silver said earlier this month that a decision on the remainder of the NBA season will not come until May at the earliest.
“We’re waiting for probably the most challenging decision that Adam Silver and his staff, not only in our sport but in every other sport [has made],” Riley said in Friday’s video. “He is being very, very cautious. I think that’s great and he’s going to rely on science. I think we have to rely on science because this will be an unprecedented move when he decides to start this thing back up.”
This story was originally published April 26, 2020 at 9:29 AM.
