The Los Angeles Lakers and every other team in the league are waiting anxiously to see whether or not the 2019-20 NBA season will resume.
There have been reports on both ends of the spectrum with the most recent saying that many believed the season would eventually be canceled.
Commissioner Adam Silver and the league will undoubtedly exhaust every option to ensure they finish out the season. If that were to happen, it would most likely occur in a single centralized location with Las Vegas being most likely. Jared Dudley believes that is not only the most likely but the only possible option.
In an interview with Michael Lee of The Athletic, Dudley explained why he believes Las Vegas is the only place the NBA could finish out the season:
Vegas is the only place that you could do this at. And the reason why, because it is the only place that has the infrastructure of hotel rooms, convention centers, where you don’t even have to go outside to be able to play a basketball game, eat food, sleep in a hotel room. You got the Mandalay Bay, Delano and the Four Seasons, you don’t have to go outside. You can go to every arena. So, if you wanted to bunker down, lock everybody down, to be able to play in there, no one in, no one out.
Dudley makes a number of good points about the infrastructure of Las Vegas lending itself well to this situation. But even with that, he realizes it is a tough ask considering the current situation of this country:
But then, the question is, are we going to be a society by June, July, that we have enough testing for security, hotel personnel, cleaning crew? And now they can’t leave, because if they go home … they have to stay on site for 60 days, maybe 90. And that’s where I get to the point, are we going to get there. Because it’s a ticking thing. You have to be able to July 1, start the season, maybe July 15 to have the season and not affect it. So, you have a time date.
There are a lot of things at play in regards to this season resuming and finishing. Dudley, the Lakers, and the rest of the teams and players are pushing for it to finish and Silver and the NBA will do everything possible as well.
Vegas seems like the best place for this to happen for all the reasons Dudley stated, but it will still take a lot of things going right for this season to not be canceled.