Harden, the perennial MVP candidate, took a coronavirus test at the Toyota Center in Houston on Tuesday as part of the league's protocol to return to play, Rockets coach Stephen Silas confirmed. Once cleared to return, the next step would be for Harden to join the Rockets training camp, which started on the weekend without him.
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After Harden missed Houston's first team workout Sunday, Silas cited the NBA's COVID-19 protocols as the reason the Rockets' face of the franchise could not practice with the team. However, Harden did not show up for an anticipated individual workout Sunday evening.
Bam Adebayo also carried his weight (all 250-plus lbs of it and then some), collecting an impressive 17 rebounds, alongside 12 points, six assists and two steals. And perhaps even more importantly, he held Giannis Antetokounmpo to 18 points and 10 rebounds – a modest statline for the former MVP."
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The premise certainly applies to the results of these playoffs, maybe more so this season than ever before. The bubble’s neutral setting closed the advantage gap between matchups, creating even greater opportunities for upsets, of which we saw several, including the fall of two of the four best records in the NBA.
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With the coronavirus pandemic ongoing, the league is facing decisions about how to undertake a campaign outside the relative security of a bubble. The NBA circulated a 134-page guide about health and safety protocols last week, but it has outstanding concerns to address.
"Almost one calendar year after the 2019-20 NBA season began, the NBA Finals are about to begin between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat. It’s been a long, grinding, tumultuous season with the deaths of Kobe Bryant and former commissioner David Stern, and an all-time footnote in the form of a four-and-a-half month hiatus brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.
The NBA had to get creative to even consider resuming its season, and it did indeed think outside the box in order to do so. As we know now, the league created a bubble environment in Walt Disney World’s Wide World of Sports, and thanks to vigorous testing and quarantining had a perfect record with no positive tests on campus.
The league pulled off something that seemed impossible back in the middle of March when they suspended the season, and along the way provided some incredible basketball. The Phoenix Suns were the seeding game champions with a perfect 8-0 record but were eliminated from playoff contention in the final game of the round.
Performances by Jamal Murray and Donovan Mitchell in a seven-game first-round battle between the Denver Nuggets and the Utah Jazz were nothing short of spectacular, and the Miami Heat’s stifling zone defense clamped down on the Milwaukee Bucks and the Boston Celtics en route to the Finals, while Anthony Davis had a fantastic scoring run for the Lakers.
Not to be left unmentioned, LeBron James had a vintage Game 5 against the Denver Nuggets to clinch things, reminding us that there’s still nobody like LeBron when he has a team on the ropes in the NBA playoffs.
The Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat are not the matchup we expected when the season began, or even when the seeding games or the playoffs began. The Lakers were never worse than the second-most likely team from the Western Conference to get here, but the Heat astonished everybody to get to the Finals."
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Silas said he did not know whether Harden had returned to Houston. Harden posted pictures on Instagram over the weekend of him attending rapper Lil Baby's birthday party in Atlanta, and videos and pictures of Harden hanging out in Las Vegas nightclubs have circulated on social media in the past couple of days.
