DALLAS (105.3 The Fan) - With the NBA still in hiatus due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban joined GBag Nation on 105.3 The Fan on Tuesday to give an update on the players and organization as a whole, as well as his thoughts on a potential return to action for the NBA.
In the interview, Cuban explained that, while it is not a daily conversation across the league, he remains hopeful that the league could begin a plan to put things in motion at some point this summer.
"I mean honestly its not a daily conversation," Cuban told GBag Nation. "We all have different connections with people and doctors, and scientists and stuff like that, and we'll all get email updates. 'Here's what the latest science is'. Some of them you understand, some of them you don't, but it's not really a daily process. It's more just waiting to hear 'are we making progress? is this possible?', and just hearing that we are making progress and that it is possible, and that time for a vaccine seems to be getting shorter, not longer, those are the positive things that I like hearing. I can't give dates or anything, because I don't know them, but I'm very hopeful."
Cuban went on to explain his stance on a possible quarantine location for the league to finish the season, admitting that, while the testing is the more difficult aspect of the situation, that the actual implementation of the players' quarantine would be relatively simple, likening the idea to the Olympic Village.
"I think it's possible," Cuban said. "I think you have to get the testing right first, and once you can do that, then the quarantine part becomes easy. If you think about the Olympic Village's, if you think about the Olympic Trials where everything is done pretty much in a single hotel, and they set up basketball courts or other facilities, gymnastics facilities, inside a hotel. So I think, from a process perspective, it can all happen, we just have to get confident with all of the science part of it, and the NBA is all over that."
While there are issues with that kind of scenario, including players' contact with their family, and other potential risks, as well as how long the resumed season would actually last, Cuban still believes the league is more than equipped to handle the situation.
"It's something, obviously, we have to work out with the players," Cuban said. "Somebody said that to get through the regular season, in terms of games, just layered out the way they were before, would be 33 days, and then, you remember the old ad, 40 games in 40 nights, and then The Finals. So, it's not a scenario that we just go so far into the summer that you just can't make it work. We can play as late into the summer as we need to."
Though optimistic, however, Cuban noted that the owners and the league have not had very many detailed conversations in regards to how things would immediately proceed, once the players' safety is in fact guaranteed, and believes that player safety has to come first.
"Honestly guys, we have not had, at least not the committees that I'm on or the meets that I'm in, we have not had a lot of detailed conversations yet about 'this is exactly how we are doing'," Cuban admitted. "All we're being told is that the NBA is exploring everything. Like you guys have said and have been reporting publicly, the quarantine thing in Vegas or Orlando, when you look at it from a process perspective like I said, those are all feasible, but it all comes down to safety. That's the one thing the NBA has said that has to come first, right? There's not going to be any second guess whether or not this is safe or not. It has to be perfect.
NBA play has been suspended since the Mavs 113-97 win over the Denver Nuggets in Dallas on March 11th, and could very well be the last game played this season unless the NBA comes up with a fool-proof plan to bring the league back into action.
