The NBA, the National Basketball Players Association and ESPN will stream a HORSE tournament on ESPN’s app.

The NBA HORSE Challenge will have eight participants. The quarterfinals are to be shown Sunday, and the semifinals and final on April 16.

The quarterfinal matchups are Trae Young of the Atlanta Hawks against former NBA player and ESPN analyst Chauncey Billups; WNBA great and 2020 Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Tamika Catchings against Mike Conley Jr. of the Utah Jazz; Zach LaVine of the Chicago Bulls against NBA retiree and ESPN analyst Paul Pierce; and Chris Paul of the Oklahoma City Thunder against Allie Quigley of the WNBA’s Chicago Sky.

Players must call their shots before the attempt and dunking is not allowed. The players will be isolated and competing on separate home courts.

“A coin toss at the start of each game will determine who shoots first, with the more senior player calling heads or tails,” ESPN said in its release. “Players must describe each shot attempt, specifying the type of score they intend to make before taking a shot, such as a bank shot or swish.”

State Farm is the presenting sponsor and will offer a prize pool exceeding $200,000 to charities working on the coronavirus response. The event will be pretaped.

NBA PLAYERS will receive their full checks when the next payday for most of them arrives on April 15 despite no games having been played for more than a month at that point.

The league gave teams the directive on Thursday in a memo that was obtained by The Associated Press.

The league and the National Basketball Players Association has been in talks for weeks about the status of salaries during the game’s shutdown. The last NBA games were played March 11, the day that Utah center Rudy Gobert became the first player in the league to test positive for the coronavirus.

The pandemic will lead to the delay of at least 259 regular-season games through April 15, what would have been the end of the regular season. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this week that no decisions about the rest of the season, including whether play can resume, would occur before May.

None of the games have been canceled yet. The playoffs were to begin on April 18, and the losses in revenue should the season either be shortened or not finished could easily reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

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