SALT LAKE CITY — The 2020-21 NBA season could end up being very condensed and arduous.
Atlanta Hawks general manager Travis Schlenk told reporters Tuesday the league office has indicated in discussions that it wants to stick as closely as possible to a traditional NBA season schedule despite a tentative start date in December.
The NBA plans to resume and complete the 2019-20 season from July 31 to Oct. 12. From there the league is planning a quick turnaround for a shortened offseason.
The league does not seem keen on cutting games from the regular season and is trying to avoid extending the season too far into the summer and clashing with the Tokyo Olympics, which were postponed to 2021.
But in order to fit in an 82-game schedule, and finish before the Olympics are set to begin in late July of next year, the NBA would have to reinstate four-games-in-five-nights sets, a practice the league did away with in 2017, and schedule an increased number of back-to-backs.
As ESPN’s Tim Bontemps explained, “If the NBA uses the same 177-day time frame to play out the regular season that it did this year, beginning on Dec. 1, the final day of the regular season would take place on Wednesday, May 26. If the playoffs started the following Saturday, May 29, and went the same 65 days that this year’s playoffs were scheduled to, they would potentially end on Sunday, Aug. 1 — more than a week after the scheduled July 23 start date of the Olympics.”
The NBA has still not released any official schedule for the 2020-21 season or said whether fans will be able to attend games or if teams will even play games in individual home markets.
If fans are not allowed at games next season, the league could look at regional locations where multiple teams could meet and play a slate of games in a short amount of time, cutting down on travel days. Teams could also play multiple games in each market rather than just one before heading to the next destination. These and other ideas have been brought to NBA commissioner Adam Silver, and as negotiations continue everything remains on the table, according to league sources.
Many of the decisions that will impact next season will be informed by the success or failure of the NBA’s return to play in Orlando, as well as risk related to the coronavirus.
When the NBA board of governors voted to approve the league’s 22-team format to resume the 2019-20 season, it offered the tentative start date for the 2020-21 season of Dec. 1. National Basketball Players Association executive director Michele Roberts told ESPN that the date surprised her and multiple reports suggest that the start date would most likely be negotiated to a later December date.
The later the 2020-21 campaign starts, the more condensed the season becomes and with a smaller window in which to complete an 82-game schedule, the more taxing the games will be on the players.
If the NBA continues with its planned full schedule, it’s very likely that in order to preserve their health and their bodies, players will be sidelined to rest more often.
Load management has become a hot-button issue in the NBA, with some praising the practice and some turning their nose up at it. Teams could have no choice but to give more thought than before to resting players with such a quick turnaround between the resumed play in Orlando and next season and so many back-to-back games expected in 2020-21.
All scheduling and calendar decisions, as with many others, will have to be collectively bargained and agreed upon between the NBA and the NBPA. Just add this to the long list of decisions that still have to be made.
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June 10, 2020 at 06:15AM
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NBA looking at a quick turnaround to the 2020-21 season and a harsh schedule of games - Deseret News
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