The NBA’s bubbleless 2020-21 season has had some challenges in terms of COVID-19 postponements, with last week’s Memphis Grizzlies-New Orleans Pelicans game marking the 16th postponement of the season in less than a month. That list has now reached 22, with Monday’s news (broken by Shams Charania of The Athletic and Stadium) that the San Antonio Spurs’ game against the Pelicans was postponed (a photo of New Orleans’ Smoothie King Center with people leaving the floor is seen above):
The following was released by the NBA. pic.twitter.com/tOC12CrpuH
— NBA (@NBA) January 26, 2021
As per Andrew Lopez and Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, this is from a potential COVID-19 exposure to people on both teams’ travelling parties:
Sources tell @wojespn and me that the issue with the postponement in the Spurs-Pelicans game is with a potential coronavirus exposure to a non-team member of the traveling parties of both teams in recent days.
The NBA is taking extra precautions with these situations.
— Andrew Lopez (@_Andrew_Lopez) January 26, 2021
It’s also notable that this came out the same day as a bunch of discussions about the NBA’s plans to potentially hold an All-Star Game this season. And further regular-season COVID-19 postponements may make it even tougher to try and work out a way to do an exhibition game like that, especially with a likely second-half schedule crunch from all these postponements. We’ll see what happens there.
[NBA on Twitter, photo from Stephen Lew/USA Today Sports]
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.