Houston Rockets: The latest on NBA’s quest to finish the 2019-20 season

The Houston Rockets’ season remains on pause as the globe does its part to fight this awful pandemic. What’s the latest on the NBA’s decision to resume?

Houston Rockets‘ faithful — it has been nearly two months since we’ve seen action from our hometown team.  March 10 marks the last game the team played, a 117-111 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves as they were doing everything they could to turn around an up-and-down stretch of basketball being played.

The small ball concept was working — with a few kinks — and we may never know how Mike D’Antoni‘s latest experiment would’ve panned out for the season as well as the playoffs.  Who knows if D’Antoni will be back to coach the Houston Rockets next season?

The relationship from a business standpoint was iceberg-cold, with the Houston Rockets holding on a new contract that would be heavily incentive-based.  This proposal was, of course, rejected by D’Antoni.

He has agreed to become a possible lame-duck coach for 2019-20 and he was okay with it until he decided to pull out the stops and prove that he could win a massive amount of basketball games without a center, hence the Clint Capela, Gerald Green and first-round pick being shipped out in favor of eventually the return being one Robert Covington, who has fit tremendously into the team’s system as I expected.

Capela was in and out of D’Antoni’s doghouse anyway, pulling him for stretches at a time so it wasn’t surprising that he packaged in a deal to be sent elsewhere.

But with these new-look Houston Rockets, when will be able to see them again?

ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski is reporting that although the NBA is deliberating on the best plan to resume, it seems that they are no further than they were one month ago, or two months for that matter when the pause button was hit on sports in general.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is reportedly lukewarm on the idea of the players being in a “bubble” with all teams in a central location like Las Vegas.  Because the city has a myriad of facilities to house such an operation, it would be a natural fit.  Woj also even points to Orlando, Fla. as an option on the Walt Disney World quarters, where there also are plentiful resources to execute their goals of finishing up 2019-20.

The current issue is that with such a contact sport that basketball is, they must test continuously and that’s not possible with the United States still trying to ramp up testing for those who need it the most.

Silver has continued to reiterate that he doesn’t want to take away resources from those particular individuals so likely the waiting game will have to continue.  He also issued a recent memo to teams instructing them not to test players who are asymptomatic, which would take away precious tests in order to get that done.

But it’s tough to tell if Silver is either waiting on the testing to get better in our country or that there’s just not a viable plan to bring this absolutely amazing sport back in front of our eyes once again.  Silver has mentioned that we could be hearing about a final decision sometime this

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month as the window closes ever so tightly to get this objective met.

That’s okay — this is something that we’ve never dealt with and I’m sure there’s just a handful of people on this Earth that can speak to what they went through during the Spanish Flu outbreak of the early 20th century.  The solutions eliminated the virus then won’t work as time gains a foothold within the 21st century.

Will the NBA get there?  There’s no question, they have a brilliant mind under Silver’s direction and there’s going to be a plan to ensure that all individuals involved will be safe and we get back to some normalcy with our lives.

But the most important thing is that there are a lot of ill people out there and they must be taken care of so we can get back on to the path of prosperity once again.

I just can’t wait to see James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Eric Gordon as well as the rest of the supporting cast once again.

We’ll get there…

Until then, we must wait and hope for the best.