Michele Roberts Opens Up About the NBA Bubble and What's Next
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Inside the Grand Floridian hotel, out of the soupy Florida heat, a wave of relief washed over Michele Roberts. For months, Roberts, the Executive Director of the NBA’s players association, worked tirelessly with league officials to piece together its return. Medical protocols needed to be worked out. Then, the financials. Yet even when an agreement had been hammered out, Roberts worried: How would players respond to months of isolation?
Not bad, it turns out. “In some ways I didn't think it would be as forgiving as it has been,” Roberts told SI in an extended interview. There were the expected complaints. Players didn’t enjoy the 48-hour hard quarantine they received upon arrival. “I think had it been longer than that,” Roberts said, “then it may have been more problematic.” Those buzzing Roberts tell her how much they miss friends, family. “The good news is that's pretty much 99% of what I hear in terms of complaints,” Roberts said. “And at the end of the day, the guys have said, ‘I got to go to work. I'm at work, I'm doing my job.’”
Roberts will admit: There were days she didn’t think the NBA would get here. On March 11, as the coronavirus pandemic raged across Europe and cases in the U.S. began to grow, Roberts met with Adam Silver. Roberts had watched the virus spread overseas. “Milan is one of my favorite cities,” Roberts said. “It was virtually shut down the first week in March. When Roberts met with Silver, the discussion was not if players would start testing positive, but how to respond when they do.
The months that followed were a roller coaster. Roberts watched the U.S. grind to a halt. She struggled to find hope in how a contact sport could be played while a highly contagious disease swept through the nation. After a few weeks, Roberts says, “I started preparing players for the season to be called.”
Said Roberts, “I thought the season was over.”
Hope came incrementally. Joe Rogowski, the NBPA’s Chief Medical Officer, began working closely with epidemiologists. The idea of a bubble surfaced. “I had very quickly grown to understand the importance of isolation, quarantine when you're suspected of, or in fact have had the virus and social distancing and using masks,” Roberts said. It sounded so simple and it was working in other environments.”
“The concept of the bubble worked because you can do all those things. If you stay home and stay away from people that have had the virus, you won't get it. That was easy enough. The question was how do we take that quarantine and be able to do it in a group context.”
For weeks, months, union and league officials traded ideas. Player safety came first, and the union rank-and-file grappled with the idea of powering through a virus with unknown long term consequences.
“There was a lot of concern,” Jaylen Brown, a union vice president, told SI. “There was a lack of information at one point. There's still some questions with COVID. We still don't know what the long-term effects are. Your hair could fall off in five years. We have no idea. It's just a new virus. So those were some of the questions. And information was being filled in, but it was not being filled in at the pace that a lot of players felt comfortable with.”
Rogowski gave Roberts and her staff a coronavirus “tutorial” once a week. “The experts really did sort of walk us through this and hold our hands and help us figure out what was possible,” Roberts said. “But for them, I would have recommended that we simply just take our losses and go home and be happy with our lives.” A breakthrough came when the NBA settled on Disney, a league partner. It had sufficient hotel space, and the NBA’s relationship with Robert Iger, Disney’s Executive Chairman, was comforting.
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“It was then I thought, ‘This can work,’” Roberts said. “Because we can actually cordon off the world, or cordon ourselves off from the world. My biggest concern was that we were going to end up having to be at a place where the so-called bubble was just going to be so penetrable that we couldn't keep the virus out. And so location made a huge difference to me, and once the Disney option became available, I became a believer.”
When George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May, some questioned whether the NBA would move forward. Roberts, though, wasn’t one of them.
“But neither was I surprised that there was a conversation about not playing,” Roberts said. “I'm so much older than the players that I sometimes have to remind myself that there's a reason for the outrage and disbelief that this could still be happening. I was around when Rodney King was beaten and those police officers were acquitted. There's a certain numbness that I'm embarrassed to admit I have when it comes to these issues, because it's just seems overwhelming and happens over and over again.”
“The abnormal becomes normal. And so our players, like the rest of the community, so many especially young members of our community, were at the point of saying enough, and knowing our guys, there was going to be some shouting. And what are we going to do? We've got to do something. We can't just go back and play basketball. So I wasn't at all surprised at the conversation. I thought it was healthy. If it hadn't happened I think on some levels, I might've been disappointed, because I do view our guys as very, very progressive and very tuned in to their communities. And so not only was I not surprised at the conversation, I was proud of it. Do I think that those players that talked about us not playing were sincere? Absolutely. I absolutely that they believed it at the time they said it that that was the appropriate course of action.”
“I also believe that those players that said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Let's take advantage of this platform.’ I believe that as well. I don't think anybody was driven by the economic reality. I think our players' passion is also informed by knowing what they do matters because people are watching it. I think those that said, we can use our platform to keep this conversation going were right, because that's exactly what they've done.”
Roberts is pleased by how players have adapted to the unique surroundings. There’s fishing and golf, while gaming is certainly popular. But walking through the campus, Roberts has noted many players outdoors, reading. She talked to one who, she says, “is a phenomenal dart thrower.” She’s enjoyed seeing the camaraderie among teammates. “I’m sure some teams have internal issues,” says Roberts. “But the guys I’ve seen genuinely seem to like each other.”
The NBA bubble is holding, with the league’s weekly announcements of zero positive tests become less anticipated than expected. But as the league attempts to complete this season, NBA officials are hard at work preparing for next season. The league would like to return on December 1, to build an 82-game season that ends in late June. The NBA wants to get back to its traditional calendar next year, and has no interest in competing with the Olympics, currently scheduled to begin in late July.
On the scheduling, Roberts has issues. The NBA Finals could stretch as long as mid-October, affording at least two teams little time to recover. “My guess is we'll probably not start until early 2021,” Roberts said. But months of work on this bubble has convinced Roberts that as long as COVID-19 is still spreading, a bubble is the only way to play.
“Right now I don't see how sports can be played outside of a bubble concept,” Roberts said. “I don't see that, given the state of where we are. Given the absence of a vaccine. Because as long as this thing spreads the way it spreads, the only way you can stop the spread from impacting their ability to perform, and this is at any job, is to isolate. Keep people separated and maintain as much distance as possible.”
“Now, having said that, do I think our guys are going to be in a bubble for six or seven months? Hell no. It's not going to happen. I think what we're going to have to do is figure out creatively how we can have bubble-like the environments that allow us to play the number of games that we believe we need to play in order to complete the season and crown a champion. If nothing else, we've learned that we have to be creative and we have been creative, and that's why we're doing what we're doing right now. It's something that no one would have thought about or had to think about five months ago.”
Indeed. Roberts says she has had “healthy conversations” with players about next season, but for many the focus remains on this one. The play-in game has added a layer of excitement and most of the top teams have emerged from the seeding games healthy. The arenas, Roberts says, “look fantastic.” Like many, Roberts was skeptical about the virtual fans (“I thought it was going to be the stupidest thing in the world.”) but, like many, has come around on them. “It’s got a real feel of an arena-filled game,” Roberts said.
There’s work to be done before next season. But Roberts is happy with what the league has put together for this one.
“Not only has this matched the expectations of what I thought might be the best we could do, it's exceeded them,” Roberts said. “And it’s because this is the formula. And I'm only hoping that we can keep this damn virus from making us all regret it.”
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