NBA commissioner Adam Silver and the rest of his team have worked hard to try to ensure that the 2019-20 season would be able to reach its much-anticipated conclusion in spite of the coronavirus pandemic. We will soon see if this feat can be pulled off or not.
As we all know, all NBA games will be held inside an isolated bubble located in Disney World. The entire remainder of the season — including each and every playoff matchup — will be held in this venue, while players and team staff will be asked to remain inside the bubble for the remainder of their respective seasons.
The concept of the bubble is by no means ideal, but at this point, it is the only viable solution given the looming threat of COVID-19. The success of this initiative will be highly dependent on the compliance of everyone within the bubble to the stern measures that have been put in place, and assuming that everything goes according to plan, the next things that needs to be determined is when the new NBA season will start.
For starters, let's review the important dates that have already been determined by the league. With the season officially restarting on July 30, all teams will play eight regular season games, which will be followed by a play-in tournament for the final playoffs spots in each conference. The first round of the playoffs will start on August 17, while the NBA Finals will conclude on October 12 at the latest.
The 2020 NBA Draft Lottery will take place on August 25, while the actual draft is scheduled for October 16 — just four days (at the very least) after the end of the previous season.
The free agency window is scheduled for October 18. Training camp is expected to begin on November 10, and finally, multiple reports have penciled in Decemeber 1 as the tip-off date of the 2020-21 NBA campaign.
The big question now is this: is December 1st the most ideal date to kick off the new NBA season?
First off, the biggest considerations are the preparations of NBA teams and players. In normal circumstances, teams are usually given around three months before the end of the previous season to the start of training camp for the following campaign. There's about a four-month window between the last possible date of the Finals to the tip-off of the next season.
Given the current predicament, there's just no way the NBA can afford such a lengthy offseason. At this point, it looks like it will be drastically reduced to just a month and a half. That's going to pose a significant issue for the players, most especially for the tenured veterans.
Take for example LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers. If, as expected by many, the Lakers make it to this season's NBA Finals, then the team will have an extremely brief offseason. James, who is turning 36 in December and will be entering his 18th season in the league, will only be provided with less than a month of rest between the end of the Finals and the start of training camp.
This will have a significant impact on his 2020-21 NBA campaign, and despite his durability, the injury risk will be increased, given how he did not have enough time to let his body rest and recover during the offseason. Now this is LeBron we're talking about here. How about the guys who are more injury-prone than him?
Given all this, perhaps the NBA should consider targeting December 25, Christmas Day, as the start date of the new campaign. This should provide teams — and more importantly, the players — with a bigger window to recuperate in the offseason. That's an extra three weeks worth of rest, which will surely go a long way.
In terms of the NBA's viewership, this also makes a lot of sense. Christmas Day games are always one of the highlights of the regular season, so why not pick that as the actual tip-off date. Sure, you can argue that the league will need to require a few weeks to heat up, so to speak, in terms of building up interest in the league, which will be thrown out the window if the season starts right smack on Christmas Day. However, we are living in unprecedented times already, and as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures.
It's not as if it's going to be a terrible risk for the NBA as well, considering how the audience has pretty much been starved with live sports, so viewership should still be relatively okay regardless of when the season actually starts. Who knows, maybe the Christmas Day tip off might just give the league the extra boost it needs at the start of the season?
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