The WNBA will hold a virtual draft in April to mitigate the risk an in-person draft would present in light of the global coronavirus pandemic, reports ESPN’s Mechelle Voepel.
Such a move could represent what the NBA may elect to do as well if global events continue to impinge on the safety of large-scale gatherings for some time, which is increasingly looking to be the case based on the estimation of a number of prominent expert scientists such as Dr. Adam Kucharski.
Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, relates that “this virus is going to be circulating, potentially for a year or two, so we need to be thinking on those time scales,” via Vox’s Brian Resnick.
“There are no good options here. Every scenario you can think of playing out has some really hefty downside,” he added.
Those downsides are already wreaking havoc on the global economy, and forcing all kind of changes on businesses’ usual operating procedures — and professional basketball is by no means immune.
For the WNBA, this means having their commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, announcing the picks teams make on a live broadcast, with draftees participating via telepresence instead of walking onto a stage.
“The prospects deserve to be drafted, and this is part of their dream,” Engelbert related via Voepel. “It was a collective decision made by the league, in consultation with the teams. We felt it was really important to celebrate and recognize their hard work and accomplishment.”
While it is still too soon to say how things will play with the NBA and individual teams like the Boston Celtics, there is a very distinct possibility such measures will have to be deployed once a date is set for the 2020 NBA Draft.
And as the Celtics Wire has previously reported, teams may also have to do their scouting, interviews and workouts using old games and remote presence as well, and would likely also require changes even to the draft lottery process leading up to it.
This happens to be an issue that could impact the Celtics in particular, given they control as many as three picks in this year’s draft.
