John Riordan: Sport struggling under heavy burden of being our escape from reality

The NBA will be one of the distractions on display in Vegas today and tomorrow with the last four remaining teams battling it out in their inaugural in-season tournament.

Buddy Hield  of the Indiana Pacers attempts a shot while being guarded by Jayson Tatum of the Boston Celtics in the fourth quarter of their quarter-final clash in NBA's inaugural in-season tournament. Picture:  Dylan Buell/Getty Images

This was all set to be a positive opening paragraph and I’ll try and get to the good news as gently as possible.

But it would have been extremely insensitive to celebrate the success of the NBA’s experiment with their own version of the FA Cup without acknowledging that the location of this weekend’s semi-finals and final suffered yet another mass shooting in the past couple of days.