The National Basketball Association was a leader in the sports world during the COVID-19 pandemic. The NBA was the league that was home to the most infamous sports incident of the COVID-19 pandemic, the canceling of the Oklahoma City Thunder vs Utah Jazz game. As a result, they very first sports league sports league to cancel a game and postpone their season because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most other sports leagues, including the MLB and NHL, would follow their lead shortly afterwards. Many fans looked to the NBA to make the first move after the shutdown.

The NBA eventually decided that they would resume play at the Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida on July 30th, 2020. The "bubble", as people would come to call it, was designed to be a secure location where the NBA could assure that any and all personnel would not catch COVID-19. Essentially, everyone invited to the bubble would be quarantine at the Disney World Resort until their team was eliminated from the playoffs or their services were no longer required. No one was allowed to enter or leave the bubble, unless consent was given by the NBA. Personnel were fined or suspended if they were discovered to have broken any of these rules.

22 out of 30 possible teams were invited by the NBA to participate in the bubble. Only teams with a reasonable chance of making the playoffs, and thus winning an NBA Championship, were allowed to participate. Bubble play started with a condensed regular season were all invited teams battled it out over a series of games to determine who would make the playoffs. After this period was over, the 16 teams with the best records (which included their records in the bubble and the season prior to the shutdown) were allowed to stay in the bubble for the playoffs. The playoffs preceded as they normally would have if there had been no pandemic, with 16 teams facing off in a best of 7 tournament to crown a NBA Champion. Eventually, The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Miami Heat to win their 17th NBA Championship, tying the Boston Celtics for the most in history.

The bubble, for all intents and purposes, was a smashing success for the NBA. Unlike the MLB, no players or personnel caught COVID-19 during there stay at the bubble. This meant that the NBA did not have to cancel or move around any of their scheduled games due to the pandemic itself. For the most part, everything preceded exactly as the NBA had planned, with only one hiccup near the beginning of the playoffs changing things. Television network and the fans, for the most part, were happy.

Before any of this occurred, some players questioned if the NBA season should restart at all. Between the times that the NBA season was temporarily postponed and when the NBA announced their restart, there was a huge protest movement throughout the United States of America about the excessive levels of police brutality on minorities, called the Black Lives Matter protest. The NBA, being a majority African American league, was affected by this movement more than any other sports league. The players, seeing themselves as role models, questioned if they should play and take attention away from this important movement. Kyrie Irving, the most radical of the bunch, even suggested that the players should forum their own league. This suggestion was never taken all that seriously, but many players truly considered not showing up to the restart.

The players' concerns were put to rest when the NBA promised to include BLM imagery during every game. The NBA allowed players to kneel during the national anthem, wear jersey's that included BLM related slogans, and use their public stage as a means to advocate for social justice causes. Almost every single player on all 22 teams did at least one, if not all, of these things. It became an extremely rare sight to see a player actually stand during the national anthem. What once was a fringe movement started by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, was now mainstream. The NBA players had accomplished their goal, fans were now more aware than ever of the BLM movement.

This agreement broke down when Jacob Blake, a 29 year old African American male, was shot in the back by Police Officers. The Milwaukee Bucks, the best team in the NBA, decided to refuse play a game in their first round playoff matchup with the Orlando Magic in protest of this shooting. All other NBA teams, and eventually all teams in the NHL and MLB, decided to eventually follow their lead and stop playing. The Los Angeles Lakers, who are home to the NBA's most famous player LeBron James, even talked about walking out of the bubble entirely. Due to the nature of the NBA playoffs, if even just one team followed through on this threat, than the entire playoffs would have been cancelled. Eventually, the NBA came to an agreement with players to come back and complete the playoffs. There were many facets to their agreement, with the most notable being that the home arenas of many teams would be used as polling places for the upcoming 2020 election. The crisis that had threatened the continuation of the NBA season had been averted.

The ratings for the NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and the Los Angeles Lakers were unusually low for the NBA. In fact, they set a record for being the all-time lowest ratings since the NBA started airing their finals live. Conservatives, who were unhappy with the BLM imagery, were quick to blame the BLM imagery for the ratings decline. Current President Donald Trump even tweeted Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James, a fierce critic of the President, blaming him for the declining ratings. The data however, disagrees with the conservatives. Television experts have argued that the NBA Final's rating were in line with trends considering their competition. The NBA hopes that ratings will bounce back next year when the finals occur near their regularly scheduled time of year.