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Many of you are not going to like what I have to say: the NBA should cancel the remainder of the 2019-20 campaign.
No shortened season. No ridiculous group stage playoff format. No bringing back 20-24 teams instead of all 30. Just eliminate the thing and put it out of its misery.
Will that happen? Probably not.
The NBA is pushing to bring basketball back by July 31 and is mulling over several different scenarios, none of which involves resuming the season in full. Basically, if the season does return, it will be a novelty act.
Think about it: would you take whoever wins the championship seriously this year?
Not only that, but if Adam Silver and Co. do reach an agreement to bring the campaign back, it will almost certainly end up going into the fall, which allows me to arrive at my most important point.
If you bring back the 2019-20 season, you are going to ruin 2020-21. Period.
The NBA season typically starts in late October every year, but if this season really does come back at the end of July, you are looking at late October as a potential end date for this season.
Then what? What do you do about 2020-21? You still have the draft and free agency. You have training camp. You have preseason.
That all generally takes about four months in a normal NBA offseason. That means the 2020-21 campaign might not start until February 2021. Heck, it wouldn't even be the 2020-21 campaign. It would just be 2021.
Yes, the NBA could expedite things by having the draft and free agency start sooner, but it's not like there is this long, dramatic waiting period between the end of the finals and the draft. The draft usually happens within a week or so after the finals conclude. This past year, the draft was held on June 20. The finals ended on June 13. Free agency then began on June 30.
So at the most, you can hold the draft a day or two after the finals end and then kick free agency off almost immediately after that, but even then, you are shaving off maybe two weeks. That's nothing.
People want basketball back. I get it. But I also feel like people aren't taking the future into consideration. If the 2019-20 campaign resumes in some capacity, you are damaging future seasons forever.
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Imagine basketball beginning around Valentine's Day and ending around the time of the World Series and smack dab in the middle of football season. Sounds weird, right?
Basketball isn't meant to be played in the summer, nor is it mean to end in mid-autumn. We could potentially be changing the entire construct of the NBA if basketball ultimately returns in July, and that is something that none of us should want to see.
Obviously, there is nothing “fair” about any of this. No matter what path the league takes, someone is going to be adversely affected, especially with these ridiculous and even laughable scenarios the NBA has come up with. I mean, trying to turn this into soccer with a group stage? Seriously?
Sorry, soccer fans, but there is a reason why your sport is not popular in America, so why should we try to model one of the nation's top sports after it?
I understand that the NBA wants to make money. It's a business, after all, and raking in cash is the end goal. But the league could actually be sabotaging itself in the long run just to come away with some dough in the short term.
Again, I don't think people realize just how potentially catastrophic the consequences of bringing the season back in July could be. Basketball could change forever in a way that none of us expected or wanted.
An asterisk next to the 2020 champion's name in the history books? A regular season that begins in February rather than October? It would be a circus.
We haven't seen basketball since mid-March, and you know what? We have survived. It's a game. You are not going to experience withdrawal symptoms because you don't get to watch LeBron James and Kawhi Leonard dribble a spherical object up and down a wooden floor. If you have made it this far (and if you're reading this, you clearly have, so good for you!), you can wait another few months so the NBA can actually get things right.
This isn't just about some pie-in-the-sky 2020 postseason with some outlandish soccer-style format. This is about the future of the NBA, and if the league isn't careful, it can permanently damage what it has worked so hard to build.
