Milwaukee Bucks: Co-owner Marc Lasry weighs in on suspended season

The NBA’s response

I don’t think any basketball fan will ever shake the feeling of watching the scene unfold in Oklahoma City Wednesday night that set off the NBA’s eventual decision to suspend the season.

And like every fan from across the world, the way Lasry found out the season was being suspended was the same as everyone else’s, even after he had just took part in the league’s board of governors meeting Wednesday afternoon:

"“I was with my kids and their friends and we’re talking about what happened at the owners meeting. I said we’re going to have a call tomorrow. I think some of the owners wanted a hiatus, some of the owners wanted to play without fans. Everybody’s going to think about it and we’re going to have another call tomorrow and we’ll talk about it again and we’ll try to do what’s right. Then, all of a sudden, one of my kids said it looks like the Oklahoma (City) game is getting cancelled. I’m like, ‘No, no, nothing’s getting cancelled tonight. It’s tomorrow at the earliest.’ And they go Rudy Gobert tested positive. I’m like ‘What are you talking about?’ And then all of a sudden, everybody went online and starting seeing the same things you did.”"

The idea that the NBA was only reacting to the news of Gobert’s positive test results and therefore, made the decision to suspend the campaign has brought on some cynics, naturally, but Lasry believes Silver and the NBA as a whole couldn’t have made that choice up until that point:

"“I think if you go back to the week on Monday, everybody was trying to figure out what should we be doing. And at that time, you didn’t have any cities or governments or states that had done anything. It’s only when you started hearing some states started to say they didn’t want X-amount of people, you started realizing it could become a real issue. I think when South by Southwest got cancelled, you starting to think ‘Wait a minute, what’s the right thing for us to do?’ and it moved really, really fast.”"