The NBA Blueprint

It’s the end of the NBA season with the Lakers taking home their first title ending a ten-year drought with star player LeBron James leading the team to victory – an emotional win for the team too following the loss of Kobe Bryant who had spent his entire career at the Lakers and who had unfortunately passed away following an accident at the start of the year. But there are plenty of lessons that may be learned from the success of the NBA, as the bubble approach taken in Florida could be the blueprint for other events to follow.

After seeing out the ending of the season, the NBA was able to take place with zero confirmed new coronavirus cases within the quarantined zone, something that no other sport has been able to do in the same period of time. It had been a little touch and go for many other major events – Major League Baseball saw a huge surge of cases which threatened postponement and cancellation of many games, the same is also true for the NFL and European football as fears grew that growing cases could cause things to be brought to an end – with a second wave potentially hitting Europe now and numbers continuing to increase in the US there are fears that the new year could bring around some further pauses to sporting events if things aren’t brought under control, and this is where the NBA’s bubble approach may be vital.

(Image from cnn.com)

Back in July, a 100-page document showing all of the rules players and teams must follow within the bubble had been spread and the stringent approach to ensuring safety was made very clear, but the results speak for themselves and no one can argue the success despite a lot of backlash early on – with the goal to get fans back in stadiums and to have uninterrupted games taking place, it may be vital that a similar approach is taken across many different sporting events to replicate the same successes found in Florida, and if cases continue to move in the way they have it’s almost certain that the NBA will replicate their own blueprint heading into the next season to once again ensure player safety.

The success here hasn’t only been good news for the sport and other sports that may follow however as many in the gambling industry have also praised the efforts made – for the bookies the start of the year had been looking like a tough time, regulation change to initiatives such as Gamstop certainly hadn’t helped but the cancellation of many events had raised concerns – a successful return to sporting has meant that services here at Maximum Casinos have been able to go ahead unchallenged, and have helped find a huge recovery for the industry – if a second wave of cancellations is rolled out there’s no certainty that similar stable ground could be found, so many here will also be pushing for a similar approach to ensure that the sporting events can stay as safe as possible, and also stay on schedule.