NBA changes plans to reopen practice facilities, and a statement from Miami-Dade on issue
NBA players won’t be able to use practice facilities this week despite a previous plan to allow facilities to open starting Friday.
After receiving pushback from teams, the NBA announced Monday it is now “targeting no earlier” than a May 8 date for a reopening of team practice facilities in cities and states where local governments have loosened stay-at-home orders, and the league “may push this timing back if developments warrant.”
All NBA facilities have been closed to players and staff since March 20 amid the coronavirus pandemic. While the eventual reopening of league facilities will be a step in the right direction, it’s still unknown whether the remainder of the 2019-20 NBA season will be played.
The NBA said in a statement: “The potential rules changes would allow teams to make their practice facilities available for use by the team’s players for workouts or treatment on a voluntary, individual basis if the team’s facility is in a city that is no longer subject to a government restriction. For any team that, due to a government restriction, is prohibited from making its facility available for use by the team’s players, the league will work with the team to identify alternatives.”
When practice facilities do open, the NBA announced the following restrictions will apply ...
▪ No more than four players would be permitted at a facility at any one time.
▪ No head or assistant coaches could participate.
▪ Group activity remains prohibited, including practices or scrimmages.
▪ Players remain prohibited from using non-team facilities such as public health clubs, fitness centers, or gyms.
In addition when facilities reopen, according to the Associated Press, players will have to wear face masks except when they are working out and staff members will have to wear face masks and gloves at all times. The new normal, at least in the beginning, will be to social distance at least 12 feet apart at all times.
If the original timetable had been kept in place, it was unclear whether the Miami Heat would have been one of the teams allowed to open its practice facility to players 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 before the NBA’s new timeline was announced. “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 plan is to ease closure orders Wednesday 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 his or her 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.
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 27, 2020 at 4:00 PM.
