It takes some cognitive dissonance to be a sports fan in 2020. The majority of NBA players are not far removed from being housed for as many as four months inside a bubble environment on the Walt Disney World campus in Orlando, Florida, amid the coronavirus pandemic and protests against racial injustice.
For the next seven months, those same players are scheduled to play 72 games in front of mostly empty arenas in 28 different cities as the pandemic continues to rage. The NBA is taking extraordinary precautions to ensure employee safety, the benefit of a billion-dollar corporation’s access to testing it partially funded, but there can be no doubt players, coaches and league personnel are risking physical and mental health for our entertainment and their financial gain.