The NBA game between the Washington Wizards and Detroit Pistons scheduled for Wednesday night was postponed because the Pistons were stranded in Dallas amid a winter storm.
The Pistons were unable to fly home to Detroit following their loss Monday against the Mavericks, the NBA announced about 6 1/2 before tipoff. The league said the date for the rescheduled game would be announced later.
Meanwhile, the New Orleans Pelicans, who are scheduled to visit the Mavericks on Thursday night, said they would not fly into Dallas on Wednesday. Instead, the Pelicans, who visited the Nuggets a night earlier, were staying overnight in Denver with plans to travel to Dallas on Thursday morning, weather permitting.
Traveling on the day of a game is unusual in the NBA. Visiting teams normally travel one or two nights before playing on the road.
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WINTER STORM IMPACTS
The deadly storm system lashed a large swath of the southern U.S. with bands of sleet and snow for a third day on Wednesday, grounding an additional 2,200 flights, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, forcing school closures and making already treacherous driving conditions worse.
Watches and warnings about wintry conditions were issued for an area stretching West Texas’ border with Mexico through Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, and into western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Several rounds of mixed precipitation, including freezing rain and sleet, were in store for many areas throughout the day, meaning some places could get hit multiple times, forecasters said.
By late Wednesday morning, 2,200 U.S. flights had been canceled, including three-quarters of the flights at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and more than two-thirds at Dallas Love Field, according to the flight tracking service FlightAware.com. Dallas-Forth Worth International is American Airlines’ biggest hub, and Love Field is a major base for Southwest Airlines.
To see the complete list of all school closings, click here.
Many flights were also canceled at other airports, including in San Antonio, the Texas capital of Austin, and Nashville, Tennessee, compounding frustrations caused by the nearly 2,000 cancellations on Tuesday and roughly 1,100 on Monday.
Nearly 260,000 power outages were reported in Texas, including more than 130,000 in the Austin area, according to PowerOutage, a website that tracks utility reports.
Pablo Vegas, who heads the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, vowed that the state’s electrical grid and natural gas supply would be reliable and that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the February 2021 blackouts, when the grid was on the brink of total failure.
Emergency responders rushed to hundreds of auto collisions across Texas on Tuesday and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott urged people not to drive. At least six people have died on slick Texas roads since Monday, including a triple fatality crash Tuesday near Brownfield, about 40 miles southwest of Lubbock.
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