ADAM SILVER STRODE to the podium before Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Phoenix Suns and Milwaukee Bucks last week, ready to address the basketball issues du jour.
Like every member of the media and the public relations staffers in the interview room underneath Phoenix Suns Arena, Silver had to be vaccinated for COVID-19 and produce a negative test within the previous 24 hours to attend.
But as compared to the hurdles he and the league had cleared since the pandemic began, it was not a bother.
It was just good, Silver said, to be back in the same place together.
"There aren't that many places, even pre-pandemic, where people gather in the way they do in arenas, come together for a common purpose ... and literally breathe each other's air," he said.
"I think that's part of the human connection. I really do miss that."
Normalcy, or something resembling it, was in sight. And Silver was taking stock of how he and the NBA had navigated this abnormal period -- but also the mark it had left.
The NBA was able to restart and complete its 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons, and Silver made a point of thanking all the players, coaches, team employees and adjacent entities to the NBA -- such as the media and vendors who staffed games -- who'd made personal sacrifices to keep the league going.
But it was a slog, in every sense of the word. Isolating, humbling, trying. All of those words apply too.
"I think the league, as a whole, should be really proud that we made it through," Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. "Because this year, in a lot of ways, was just about survival."
The past year and a half has been exhausting, every decision exacting an existential and physical toll. It wasn't enough to decide that the NBA would do whatever it took to keep playing throughout the pandemic. There are untold stories of COVID-19 outbreaks, mounting injury numbers and important and continuing conversations surrounding race and law enforcement.
These have been, in many ways, the most consequential and unprecedented two seasons in NBA history.
"Frankly, we may not know for quite a while," Silver said, "whether we made the right decisions or not."
FOR SOME, LIKE Dallas Mavericks guard Josh Richardson, the past 16 months are probably best forgotten.
"I mean, I got COVID twice," Richardson says. "I'm hoping that this is just a memory that we look back on a few years and like, 'Oh yeah, that was crazy.'"
But then he caught himself.
"I think my takeaway is how adaptable we are," he says. "How proud I am that everybody was able to ... the NBA was able to make a semi-safe space for us to be able to compete."
Richardson says he first tested positive on March 11, 2020, after the Philadelphia 76ers, for whom he was playing at the time, beat the Detroit Pistons. Four days prior, the Utah Jazz had played the Pistons. Rudy Gobert also tested positive for COVID-19 on March 11, and the Pistons subsequently had positive tests, as well.
Richardson says he didn't have any symptoms the first time and quarantined at his house -- with his dog, Champ -- for 25 days.
"That was before we knew anything about it," he says. "We didn't even test every day, so it could've been a false positive. But I was scared. I didn't want to give it to anyone else."
He also didn't want to talk about it publicly.
"At the beginning, people would look at you funny," he says. "Like you had the plague."
The second time he tested positive for COVID-19, there was no doubt. His symptoms started shortly after a game at the Denver Nuggets in early January. He lost his appetite. Then the headaches started. Then the body aches and chills.
For the next 11 days, Richardson sat alone in his hotel room in Denver.
"The only time I opened the door was to get tested at 7 in the morning and 5 at night," he says. "I could order Uber Eats. But they'd leave it at the front desk, and the people at the hotel would bring it up and knock on the door and sprint away."
After a few days, he started feeling better. But he was still testing positive, so he had to stay in his room. He'd call teammates Jalen Brunson and Dorian Finney-Smith, who were quarantining themselves in separate rooms.
"We were all just making sure each other was still alive every day," he says.
A Mavericks trainer sent them Advil, Tylenol and electrolytes. Richardson would do pushups or work out on an exercise bike when he felt up to it. Most of the time, he slept, played video games or watched Mavericks games on TV.
The room had a window, at least.
"But it was looking at a freaking abandoned Greyhound bus station," Richardson says. "And it was snowing."
One of the days he noticed what looked like a music video being filmed on top of the bus station.
"That was entertaining!" he says. "I watched the whole production. They had an orange Mustang and people standing on top of it."
Richardson never found out what song the music video was for, but he hopes someone reading this will tell him.
For closure -- or something like it.
EVERY COACH IN the league had to find a way to talk to players about everything they'd be signing up for this season. From daily testing -- which was more like three times a day during the height of the surge in January -- to the lack of personal freedom on the road to restrictions on how many family members and friends they could see.
"We actually talked to the team about [the safety protocols] many times during the season," Kerr says. "'Yeah, this sucks, but you really have to put it in perspective and remember how fortunate we are to be working."
There were no fans in arenas for the first few months. Some teams covered the empty seats; others put up cardboard cutouts. Everyone played music and piped in fake crowd noise to try to distract from the silence. But that was almost worse, Kerr says.
"It was almost like laugh tracks in a sitcom," he says. "You could tell it was a little fake, and the timing would be just off. Somebody makes a great play and the reaction is a split-second late."
After 10 months, fans started to trickle back, but there was a haphazardness to that too, depending on guidance from local public health officials.
For example, Florida, where the Miami Heat, Orlando Magic and Toronto Raptors played their home games, allowed fans back in less than a month into the season.
The Heat allowed 1,500 season-ticket holders -- a little more than 7% of AmericanAirlines Arena's capacity -- back into its arena on Jan. 28 with the assistance of dogs who purportedly could detect COVID-19.
"Having people in the building, that's what our guys play for," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said at the time.
But the Raptors, who relocated to Tampa for the season due to Canada's restrictions on travel during the pandemic, had a different experience.
They also had considered cities such as Nashville, Louisville and the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area as a temporary home, but ultimately, they converted a ballroom at the JW Marriott hotel adjacent to Tampa's Amalie Arena into two practice courts, meeting spaces, offices and a locker room. Many players and support staff lived at the hotel for the season. Others, including coach Nick Nurse, rented a house nearby.
"I think originally, we probably had thought a lot of Canadians winter in Florida," Nurse says. "But none of them were traveling back and forth like they normally would."
It was strange going from one of the best home crowds in the NBA in Toronto, he says, to a smallish amount of fans who mostly seemed to be rooting for the Raptors' opponent. But this is a man who coached in the British Basketball League, the United States Basketball League and the D-League before coming to the NBA.
"I played Lithuania in London, and the whole stadium was Lithuanian," Nurse says with a laugh. "It was rough. It was rough. But listen, without sounding too high in the sky, I'm glad we were working."
The hardest part, Nurse says, was the outbreak his team went through in March. According to data compiled by ESPN's Kevin Pelton, the Raptors had nine players miss games in health and safety protocols. Their total days missed were the third highest number of any team, behind the Boston Celtics and the Mavericks.
In all, 149 NBA players missed 707 games in health and safety protocols this season, which caused 31 games to be postponed and rescheduled.
"We'd just had a good run," Nurse says. "I think we won in Brooklyn. Won two in Milwaukee. Came back and beat the 76ers at home. I think we climbed into fourth. Then we turned around and got smacked by about -- I don't know how many cases it was in the end, but it was a lot."
The outbreak affected virtually all of Toronto's key players, as well as the coaching staff, via infection or contact tracing. The Raptors went 1-13 in March and fell completely out of the playoff race.
"That's one thing a lot of people learned, that it wasn't like the 14 days, snap your fingers and you were back to normal," Nurse says. "It was more like a monthlong process to get your conditioning back."
UNCERTAINTY AND OUTBREAKS left teams such as the Raptors, Celtics, Mavericks, Memphis Grizzlies and Washington Wizards with a compressed schedule in the second half of the season.
In the nine-plus weeks from the All-Star break to the end of the season, the Grizzlies played a league-high 22 sets of three games in four nights. (The league average was 13.9 sets of such instances this season.) The Spurs, at No. 2, had 21. Memphis also had eight instances during that same stretch in which it played five games in seven days, while the Spurs had seven. (The league average was 3.2 sets of such instances.)
Rhythms were disrupted. Practices and shootarounds were virtually nonexistent. Injuries mounted. Fatigue of all sorts -- mental, physical, emotional -- set in.
"Not to get too coach-y about it," Nurse says, "but you got to build some habits, right? There just wasn't that rhythm of practice that enables you to build them.
"It was more like you were just trying to get to games, play them and do the best you can."
The emotional toll was even more difficult. After the Wizards' season was shut down for almost two weeks in mid-January due to an outbreak that affected seven players, general manager Tommy Sheppard said: "These guys are young, and they are away from their families. Rui [Hachimura]'s entire support network is in Japan. [Moritz] Wagner's parents are all in Germany. [Davis] Bertans, his wife is pregnant; he had to be away from his wife and kids. Everybody had a unique thing they had to fight through. "
During their dynastic years, one of the ways Kerr's Warriors teams built chemistry and culture was to go out for team dinners on the road. That was impossible for most of this season. But even when restrictions eased after vaccines became widely available, the concept was fraught with risk.
"We had one in Houston [before a March 17 game], but I did not attend," Kerr says, indicating he was newly vaccinated but still nervous about group gatherings. "We ended up with six people in contact tracing because of the team dinner."
A month later, the Warriors tried again in Boston. They were fully compliant with the league's health and safety protocols. But Kerr still wasn't comfortable.
"I walked in and there were just a lot of people in a very closed space, and I turned right around and went back and ordered room service," Kerr says. "I was just afraid. I just wasn't ready."
Only recently, Kerr says, has he started to eat indoors and walk around without his mask.
"It's all just perspective," he says. "[More than 600,000] people have died in this country. So, you have to keep the perspective of, 'We're going to get through this.'
"And we are now, with the vaccines, it feels like we're getting through it."
AS THE LEAGUE was trying to get through the pandemic, it also was reckoning with the responsibilities of playing basketball while immersed in a national conversation on race, police brutality and social justice.
No franchise was closer to that intersection than the Minnesota Timberwolves.
In April, a white Brooklyn Center police officer shot and killed a Black, 20-year-old motorist, Daunte Wright, at a traffic stop just a few miles from the Minneapolis courthouse where the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin was taking place.
The trial brought back painful memories from last summer, when George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed by Chauvin, a white police officer, while in Minneapolis police custody.
Protests broke out in Minneapolis again.
The Timberwolves were on the road at the time, watching their home city hurting and wondering whether playing basketball games would help heal or distract from the civil rights issues that had been brought to the forefront again.
"It is not something that you can run from," Timberwolves president of basketball operations Gersson Rosas says. "It's something that gives you a chance to talk to the players about, and it gives you an opportunity to really come together.
"Everybody's angry. Everybody's upset. But what do we do now? No. 1 is understanding. No. 2 is education. And No. 3 is action. Where do we go from here?"
Rosas hired a special consultant, Tru Pettigrew, to work within the organization to foster discussion about what had happened in Minneapolis and assist in coming up with plans of action to help the community.
As Rosas says, "Our players were like, 'This is not the first time it's happened. It's not going to be the last time. How do we make it something different? How do we make sure that we do whatever we can to do our part to respond to this?'"
All of the major sports teams in Minnesota -- the Timberwolves, Wild and Twins -- then in competition postponed games in the wake of Wright's death.
The Timberwolves resumed play the following day against the Brooklyn Nets, but the game was played without fans and 3½ hours early to accommodate the citywide curfew in Minneapolis.
Players from both teams wore black warm-up shirts adorned with the phrase, "With liberty and justice FOR ALL."
With Liberty And Justice 𝙁𝙤𝙧 𝘼𝙡𝙡 pic.twitter.com/zExc6MTKFU
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) April 13, 2021
A moment of silence was held for Wright, before tipoff.
"All we can do is be here for each other physically, emotionally try to comprehend what guys are going through," Timberwolves guard D'Angelo Russell said after the game. "I encourage everybody to go out there and do what you can physically do to make things better, not just speak about it."
IN BETWEEN THE endless nasal swabs, brutal schedules, boxed dinners after games on the loading docks and isolation from friends and family, the NBA's play-in tournament provided something of a respite. Instead of preparing for the lottery, there was a thrilling race to compete in the inaugural play-in tournament, which pitted the seventh-place through 10th-place teams against each other for the final two playoff spots.
While there was criticism from some -- basically every team that sat in seventh place for any length of time -- the tournament was generally seen as a resounding success for the drama it created during a period of time that's usually performative.
The Warriors-Los Angeles Lakers play-in game for the No. 7 seed on May 18 drew an average of 5.6 million viewers, making it the most watched contest on ESPN since the NBA's 2019 Western Conference finals.
"It felt like a Finals game to me," Kerr said. "It was really bizarre, but it was so fun. Just to feel that pressure and to feel that tension with a lot of fans in the stands, it was great stuff."
Golden State then lost the play-in game for eighth place to the Grizzlies, meaning they missed the playoffs for the second consecutive year, a massive disappointment for the former champions. But Kerr says that overall, the season was a net positive.
Stephen Curry and the Warriors got into the play-in tournament by winning eight of their final nine games to finish as the eighth-place team in the West.
"Even though we didn't quite get in, we really did have a good stretch, and I think it kind of made the season matter," Kerr says.
He was borrowing a phrase, he says, from Curry, who addressed his teammates right before the Warriors went on their finishing kick.
"He just said, 'We have to make this season matter,'" Kerr recalls. "And I thought by the end of the season, 'You know what? This season really did matter. Steph was right.'"
THERE IS STILL so much that matters. For Portland Trail Blazers center Jusuf Nurkic, who says he lost several family members to the virus, the task ahead is vital.
His home country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been ravaged by COVID-19, with over 200,000 confirmed cases and 9,600 deaths reported to the World Health Organization, but it still has very limited access to the vaccine.
"They just have donations, but not enough to vaccinate the people," Nurkic says. "I tried to buy it for the whole country. I figured out the money, the plan and everything. But we still can't do it.
"Even if we find vaccines, I guess United States laws say that until the American people are vaccinated, you can't sell it. So, I don't know what else to do. I really tried."
What's even harder, Nurkic says, is knowing how much vaccine supply is going unused in the United States, which he would gladly purchase for his country.
"All these countries are suffering and you have the United States, obviously the No. 1 in the world, has the vaccines and people don't want to get vaccinated," he says.
"I just feel like humanity has kind of failed, because all the countries around should get at least some of those vaccines, right?"
Last July, just as the NBA's bubble was beginning in Florida, Nurkic learned that his grandmother in Bosnia and Herzegovina had contracted COVID-10 -- and treatment options were limited.
"After 17 days, she survived the COVID," Nurkic says. "Then on Day 19, she had a heart attack. It was unbelievable."
Nurkic got the news as he was on a bus to a game.
"At that point, I wished I could just take a plane to go to the funeral," he says. "Probably, if I could do it again, I would do that. It's difficult when you're really far away."
WHILE NORMALCY MIGHT be in view in the United States, Nurkic's story is a stark reminder that the pandemic is still raging around the world.
The Tokyo Olympics will be played without fans in a few weeks, despite calls domestically and internationally to cancel them altogether, as Japan's low vaccination rate and rising case numbers have forced local officials to declare a state of emergency just as the world is arriving for the Summer Games.
The virus, as Silver has often said, is still in control. The pandemic isn't over.
"We're mindful," Silver said. "That as much as I want to close the book and say we have lived through it, of course I'm reading the same stories you all are about delta variants and other things."
But for the moment, he was grateful to be breathing the same air as so many of the players and executives he has spent countless hours with on the phone or via video conferencing throughout the past year and a half.
There was some "poetic justice," Silver said, that Suns guard Chris Paul, the head of the National Basketball Players Association, had finally made it to the Finals this season.
"I was on the phone with him at least once a week since March 11 of 2020," Silver said. "He devoted an enormous amount of his personal time to leading the players. Not an easy job, not without criticism."
Everything the NBA decided since March 11, 2020, had to be collectively bargained with the players' union. Paul's job was to liaison with the league and to make sure the players he represented found consensus.
Those discussions were often contentious. But Silver hoped that the process of finding common ground had taught players and franchise owners about each other.
"That sense of unity, I hope we can keep up," Silver said. "I think the players have a better understanding of what we're up against in trying to run this business, and we have a better understanding of the players -- what it's like to travel the amount they do, the stresses they're under, the emotional and physical burdens they're under by competing at this level."
In a few days, Silver will hand the Larry O'Brien Trophy to either the Suns or Bucks. A new champion will be crowned in front of a sellout crowd, just as it was before this unprecedented year and a half.
Next season should be back on the traditional October-June calendar, with the regular, 82-game schedule.
But it will be a new normal. Not a return to the way things were.
"There are things we have learned," Silver said. "I hope we can keep it up."