UPDATE: The NBA has announced that the season has been suspended after a Jazz player tested positive for coronavirus. More information can be found here.
As the coronavirus continues to threaten the United States, the NBA has taken a drastic step. On Wednesday, the Golden State Warriors announced that their home games will be played without fans for the foreseeable future after San Francisco banned events with crowds of more than 1,000 people. Wednesday, the entire NBA decided to play games without fans, but news of a Utah Jazz player who contracted coronavirus led the league to suspending the entire season.
Considering the physicality of the game and the league's likely inability to control who players come into contact with in their personal lives, one player getting a confirmed diagnosis was enough to force his entire team and any team that played against him into a 14-day quarantine. The policies the league is enacting now are being taken in an effort to prevent the spread any further than it already has gone.
All of this is uncharted territory. The NBA previously implemented new media guidelines to avoid big scrums in and around locker rooms, requiring a six-to-eight feet gap between players and media, along with the fan ban. Then the suspension. It's not clear how long this suspension will last.
The NBA has billions of dollars on the line through tickets, television sales and practically every other stream of revenue it cultivates during the season. The league is naturally doing everything in its power to preserve that revenue, but the increasingly dangerous virus has already begun cutting into that bottom line.