Here’s what we know and don’t know about the postponed game, potential punishments and the league’s next steps.
One day after the 2020-21 regular season tipped off, the NBA has postponed its first game. Late Wednesday afternoon, the NBA announced that the matchup between the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder scheduled for 8 p.m. ET had been postponed because the Rockets did not have eight players available. This news only underscores the myriad challenges the league faces in trying to complete its season outside of the confines of a bubble at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, within which the NBA finished the 2020 playoffs. As the NFL, MLB and MLS have already demonstrated, trying to pull off a season outside of a bubble comes with all sorts of complications. Here’s what we know and don’t know about the postponed game, the latest with James Harden and what’s next for both the Rockets and the rest of the NBA. What’s going on in Houston? The Rockets, per reporting from ESPN’s Tim MacMahon and Adrian Wojnarowski, are dealing with two separate coronavirus-related issues. Editor’s PicksNBA postpones Thunder-Rockets gameThe Rockets created a culture that gave James Harden all the power 1 Related After a video of Harden maskless and out at a club surfaced on social media, the NBA began investigating whether Harden violated the league’s safety protocols by going to an unsanctioned indoor event sometime in the past week. The Rockets also had three players return tests that were either positive or inconclusive and had to put four other players — including former All-Stars DeMarcus Cousins and John Wall — into the league’s contact tracing program after they were in a barbershop with rookie Kenyon Martin Jr., who was one of the players with conflicting COVID-19 test results. The combination of the two events left Houston with fewer than eight players available, forcing the postponement of the Rockets’ season opener against the Thunder. When will the game against the Thunder be made up? The league hasn’t announced a date for the game to be replayed, but it built flexibility into its schedule to address this scenario. By only releasing the games to be played through March 4, the NBA has three rescheduling options: before the March 5-10 midseason break; during that break; or in the second half of the season, for which the schedule won’t be announced until sometime in February. Per ESPN’s Royce Young, the Thunder will fly back to Oklahoma City on Wednesday.
