Coronavirus: Seasons interrupted

The NHL put its schedule on ice less than a month before the playoffs were supposed to begin, as it and the rest of the world grappled with the coronavirus.getty images

The sports world moved from press on to called off last week, all in a bewildering 24 hours.

In hindsight, we should have realized what was coming when a leading public health official told Congress on March 11 that it would be best if sporting events were played without fans, specifically invoking the name of one league: the NBA.

That night, a game between the Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder was postponed seconds before tipoff, the resolution of a bizarre scene that was the result of Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert testing positive for the coronavirus.

The NBA announced that it would pause its season indefinitely.

And then, the sports world stopped.

The next day the NHL and Major League Soccer joined the NBA in the suspension of their seasons. Major League Baseball shut down spring training and pushed Opening Day back at least two weeks. The NCAA canceled March Madness, the College World Series — every last one of its championships for the remainder of the school year, the seemingly inevitable follow-up to the tabling of 14 conference basketball tournaments.

There is no way to know what all this will cost, beyond the estimates of what some teams stand to lose as a result of each game never played. No way to know when any of them will resume, or if all will resume in time to salvage their respective seasons. No clear solution for a business that relies on athletes competing in close quarters and spectators sitting side by side.

The business impact stretches well beyond teams, leagues, schools and event operators, to concessionaires and their hourly employees, to sports networks left without live programming, to more ancillary ventures than you can think of in one sitting.

For all that is new about this, this much is not: Leagues have endured cancellations of games and truncations of seasons as the result of lockouts and strikes, many of them not that long ago. The NHL shortened its season during its lockout of 2012 and canceled its entire season in 2004. The NBA lost games during its lockout in 2011. A player strike led to the cancellation of the World Series in 1994.

Of course, there is one significant distinction: Unlike during a work stoppage, teams remain responsible for their largest expense, the payment of player salaries — yet one more unprecedented facet of an unimaginable week.