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The announcement came shortly after a game between the Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder, after a player on the Jazz tested positive for the coronavirus.
The NBA released a statement announcing their decision:
As ESPN NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski reported on Twitter, the league will use the suspension of play to determine what steps to take going forward.
Wojnarowski also identified the Jazz player infected with the virus.
Most NBA teams have roughly 11 games left in the regular season. However, the league's elongated postseason runs all the way until June. Though, with only half the league involved in the postseason, the league could opt to have teams play in arenas that are removed from areas thought to be more at high risk for contamination.
Another possible solution could be to have teams that are already mathematically eliminated from playoff competition, end their season early to minimize the risk of spreading the virus.
According to reports, the NBA will soon begin testing all of its players for the virus, perhaps as soon as tonight.
Other sports leagues will likely take similar action, most notably, Major League Baseball. MLB is currently playing spring training games in front of large crowds. Not only that, the beginning of the league's regular season is less than a month away.
R.C.
*As I've repeatedly noted, if you wish to read a war memoir that really - as much as one can - makes you 'enjoy' (sic) being in the presences of a real war, I've never read closer than Barbusse's 'Under Fire"; free [Link] It was published while WWI was still in full swing, (12/2016) plus there was already a book industry to publish it. Therefore the PTB made certain to thereafter more completely control the narrative, (e.g., Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" wasn't published until ~ thirteen years later! - and directly copied portions of Under Fire, (such as the focus on the mundane parts of war); and likewise, when WWII came around, we ended up with A. Murphy's damn-near a Hollywood movie script, "To Hell and Back" etc.
**I figured that the name might have been akin to Brits calling VD 'the french disease' which the French called "the Italian disease." etc. But me thought to self, why the Spanish flu, given that in WWI,Spain was one of the only large European nations to remain neutral. Well, here's that answer, and it makes perfect sense: RC