The NBA postponed Sunday’s matchup between the Chicago Bulls and Toronto Raptors due to the league’s health and safety protocols for COVID-19.
The Raptors played Friday night against the Houston Rockets without their head coach Nick Nurse, five assistant coaches and forward Pascal Siakam, and would not have been able to field the minimum eight players required for a game due to contract tracing issues.
The Bulls flew to Tampa, Fla., where the Raptors are hosting their home games this season because of border restrictions in Toronto during the pandemic, on Saturday night, but never even made a film session scheduled for Sunday morning before the game was called. The team is scheduled to return to Chicago later Sunday in advance of hosting the Denver Nuggets on Monday night at the United Center.
This marks the fourth time the Bulls have had a game postponed by the league’s health and safety protocols during the first half. They rescheduled one game against the Detroit Pistons to lighten their second half schedule a bit, but teams will be running a gauntlet heavily with back-to-backs and three games in four nights to try and complete this condensed 72-game schedule.
If the Bulls can successfully play their final two games before the All-Star break, which runs from March 5-10, they will have played 34 games in the first half. That leaves 38 games to complete before the end of the year.
“Everybody’s dealing with this in terms of trying to play a condensed schedule in a short period of time,” coach Billy Donovan said earlier this week.
“There’s a lot of challenges with it on a lot of fronts. Very, very limited practice times. We have three segments throughout those games where there’s actually two days in-between a game. So I think the balance of the rest and recovery, how well those guys take care of themselves, what we can get done in shootarounds, how can we continually progress and get better with limited practice time. A lot to juggle, really challenging, but I think everybody’s kind of dealing with the same circumstances.”
