Schedules may not have their traditional appearance, but 1 thing basketball has going for it is that it's fairly easy to schedule a game on short notice, and school sizes matter less in hoops than in a high-contact sport like football or other sports where more bodies are competing at once. The odds of finding a last-minute replacement game are decent. It'll be like the 2nd night of a back-to-back where you just roll out the balls and see who really knows how to play the game and which coaches can think on their feet. It will be interesting to see how many games the average team is able to get in and how many times the average team is asked to quarantine. Honestly, I'd be most worried about the officials. We know the officiating pool isn't particularly deep to begin with. For starters, how many have decided not to work this season? On top of that, if too many officials are asked to quarantine at the same time, then there will be some games that simply can't be played as scheduled due to a lack of replacements for those who were originally contracted to work the game.
My current thought is to start the season as planned and go from there. I'm no expert, but I envision a rough road lies ahead from December to February, regardless of when the 1st basketball games are played, so postponing the start of the season into January would likely do nothing except increase the likelihood of no games being played at all. I don't disagree that the season may experience a large-scale interruption. However, it may be difficult to finish the season depending on when an interruption occurs. Get games in when it's possible and reasonable to do so.
After what I experienced as the coach of a spring sport, I'd take a couple of games and any need to postpone/ultimately cancel the remainder of the season over no games being played at all. Even if only a couple games end up being played, at least coaches and players have some idea of the players' progress and what to work on next. The spring sports didn't even yield that much. I still have no idea what half of my athletes can do since we never reached the point of competition last spring. When school and the subsequent athletic seasons were first shut down last spring, it was difficult to see how the contingency plan to resume the season was going to work well if we got back into school in May and had the state track meet scheduled to happen the last weekend of June. Many kids did nothing during the time from when we last practiced on March 12 to the point around mid-April when they began seeing the writing on the wall for the school year and then onward to the point in late April that school was officially closed for the rest of the spring. Part of that issue was the broad shutdown of athletic facilities, but the larger part was that it's easy for some kids to get in the habit of sleeping in late, camping out on their electronic devices, or playing video games for hours on end. Admittedly, I'm not much different.
