While Major League Baseball and its player’s union have struggled with all that’s involved trying to jumpstart a shortened 2020 regular season, the NBA appears to have found an acceptable way to finish off theirs.
It won’t look like what we’ve seen before, and while the tournament idea could be a lot of fun, the whole thing could have a very negative impact on the hoops we watch in the future.
There were less than a dozen regular season games left on the schedule when the league was shut down on March 13. It was the NBA that took the lead in getting players off the court after Utah’s Rudy Gobert tested positive for Coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, the NCAA cancelled March Madness, the NHL halted their season, and MLB put the brakes on spring training.
The NBA appears to be taking the lead in getting back to work as well.
The league has announced plans to resume play on July 31 in Orlando at the Walt Disney World complex. There will be 22 teams involved – all within six games of a playoff spot when the season was suspended – battling for postseason seeding.
The league plans to play four or five games per day with no fans in attendance. They’ll play eight “regular season/seeding” games that will shape the playoff field before beginning a standard postseason format that’s supposed to be completed by the end of October.
Oh, and next season is supposed to start on December 1st.
We’re all eager to see live sports on TV again. You can watch only so much NASCAR and golf, right? But what will this resumption – and the extension on the NBA calendar – mean to the quality of the NBA product – for rest of this year and next?
The players will have already had what amounts to a full off season (almost four months) by the time they report to Florida to train on July 9th. While rust may be a problem, fatigue shouldn’t be. Not for the remainder of this season. But we have literally no idea which players have been staying in shape during the pandemic – when they were not allowed until very recently to work out at team facilities – and who has perhaps ‘let themselves go’ a bit. While running out of gas shouldn’t be an issue, any player that isn’t in prime condition will be more susceptible to getting hurt – perhaps badly – than a player who’s been working hard on his own and kept himself game ready.
Injuries and fitness will be a big factor in finding out which team wins this season’s NBA crown, and who puts themselves in the best position to compete again in 2021.
After these playoffs are done, the players will get very little time off to rest before starting next season, when they’ll be expected to resume play at a high level for the next round of 82 more games. This will amount to well over 100 games played for many of the league’s very best players over a condensed nine month period, with only a small break during the month of November, 2020.
So, it’s more than fair to speculate that this very well could have a big (and not in a positive way) impact on what we see – and who we don’t see – in 2021, both in the NBA season and in next summer’s Olympics. How many elite NBA players are going to be willing to sacrifice next summer’s vacation time to play for their country after the grind they’re about to endure leading up to that?
While three guys who haven’t played much or at all recently due to injury – Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson – could still be fresh and okay for the next machination of the Dream Team, it’s a pretty good bet we don’t see guys like LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard, James Harden, Paul George, Kyrie Irving and others suiting up for Team USA in Tokyo. And that will be too bad.
The NBA’s plan to try something different to conclude this season is a terrific idea. Make 2020 memorable for something other than a pandemic and civil unrest. It would be great if hockey and baseball followed the same plan. But it would be even better if they found a way to not make the end of 2020 damaging to all of 2021.
Listen to Mark Knudson on Monday’s at 12:30 with Brady Hull on AM 1310 KFKA and on Saturday mornings on “Klahr and Kompany” on AM 1600 ESPN Denver.
More from The Woody Paige Sports Network:
- Woody Paige: 52 years later, America is still fighting the same fight
- What if the Trail Blazers took Michael Jordan in the 1984 NBA Draft?
- Betting odds to lead the NFL in rushing yards in 2020
- Woody Paige: Thanks to MLB owners, there will be crying in baseball
- Stick to Sports? No thanks. We need more athletes in politics
