Excellent, the bubble worked! Congratulations to the NBA, the Players Association, Walt Disney World and everyone else involved in pulling off this massive logistical challenge without one single case of COVID-19 emerging in the player or staff populations.
So, uh … now what?
With the NBA season successfully completed without incident, it’s time for the hard work of figuring out how and when the 2020-21 season happens, and where the offseason milestones are that we’ll hit first.
Fortunately, the league now has several weeks to sit back and figure out all the logistics of its next season. Watching baseball, soccer and football be the guinea pigs for a while should provide some more ideas on how to implement a non-bubble 2020-21 season. As Players Association chief Michele Roberts
noted in recent interviews with our Shams Charania and Sam Amick, it’s possible there will be a bubble for the playoffs, but a bubble for the regular season seems a non-starter. Widespread rapid testing remains a potential game-changer for the league in this regard, especially when it comes to allowing fans in buildings.
We can’t predict some of the COVID-19-related obstacles and barriers for next season, as we’ve learned to our great pain. Nonetheless, we have some known milestones as we proceed into a very unusual offseason. Here’s what the roadmap looks like:
Early-mid November — Determine the 2020-21 salary cap and reset player option dates
The biggest and most important milestone for the league will be agreeing with the Players’ Association on next season’s salary cap. There is a lot more that goes into it than just selecting a random number, as they need to come to agreements on how much to withhold from player salaries in the near-certain event of a revenue shortfall, and to make some headway on a potential cap number for 2021-22.
Along with that, the league will need to rewrite all of the player options, team options and partial guarantee dates in every NBA contract for 2020-21 to reflect the revised offseason calendar. This was already done once, shortly before the resumption of play in the bubble, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to repeat. With the draft likely pegged at Nov. 18 (see below), the league just needs to nail down the date free agency begins and then it can get to work on the options.
Nov. 18 — NBA draft
Here’s the one known marker on the NBA calendar right now: The draft will definitely happen on Nov. 18. Part of the prep is ongoing: Already a “virtual combine” is underway that consists of 30-minute Zoom interviews between players and teams and, more important, in-person medical testing and measurements. The measurements and medical are the most likely things to move prospects up and down draft boards in the next month.
Players are also able to share on-court videos with teams, but most of these videos are likely to be agent-curated and thus have near-zero value for front offices. In that way, they’re similar to the “agent workouts” of most draft seasons, which are great venues for information sharing but basketball-wise largely consist of watching prospects hammer poster dunks on 5-foot-9 trainers.
The important part for teams will be having clarity on the 2020-21 cap ahead of the draft, as that will allow teams to trade with greater certainty. Execs would appreciate any shreds of wisdom the league can offer on the 2021-22 cap as well, although it seems less likely this will be known by mid-November.
Late November — Announce when next season starts
The league said it would provide eight weeks notice ahead of whenever the next season is set to begin, so if you work backward from the current hope of Jan. 18, that would involve the league committing to this date on Nov. 23. One hopes that the league will feel good enough about this date to commit to it a little over a month from now, but for a variety of reasons I’ll get into below, it sure seems like Martin Luther King Day is the sweet spot for opening day.
If, for some reason, we haven’t heard anything by Thanksgiving, it’s a red flag that the Jan. 18 date is in peril, and we could be looking at starting in February or even March.
Late November or Dec. 1 — Free agency
The league’s stated aim is to begin free agency on or before Dec. 1. This would give teams and agents a couple of weeks of runway from when the next year’s cap number is known to when they have to commit to deals for the following season.
Since no execs really want to deal with this stuff on Thanksgiving, and the league probably can dominate the media conversation much better by having free agency happen the following week, my guess is that the starter gun for free agency goes off on the afternoon of Nov. 30. If so, that gives us a nice three-week frenzy to sign players before Christmas, and then everybody has to turn around and get ready for training camp.
December — Make the schedule
For those of you who have never been part of this fun, let me assure you there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes in designing the layout of an 82-game season. Normally it takes several months, but the league is working on a compressed timeline.
And this time, the league is trying to achieve several aims simultaneously:
- Reduce travel
- Play 82 games in less time
- Reduce COVID-19 infection exposure
On the other hand, one positive force for the schedule-makers is that the arenas aren’t booked for anything else right now. Normally, navigating around concerts, tractor pulls and ice shows is one of the biggest hurdles in cobbling together the schedule, especially at busy venues like Staples Center. Ice hockey and college basketball may grab a few dates in some arenas, but for the most part the league has a blessedly clean slate to fill in.
There has been a lot of discussion about multi-game series as well. These can be very helpful if the league is going to complete the season quickly and limit the travel. Meanwhile, the normal argument against it is that it reduces fan interest for the second and third game against the same opponent, but we don’t even know if these games will have
any fans.
Let me throw this one out there, for instance: It seems you could play 82 games by having each team play eight games against division opponents, four games against the other teams in its conference and a total of just 10 non-conference games, five home and five road, in a quickie sweep through a division. (For example, the five Atlantic Division teams could blow through the Northwest division in eight or nine days).
With so many games against divisional opponents, the schedule would set up for multi-game series that could both lessen the total travel and allow the league to bang out a full 82 more quickly. Especially for the more far-flung divisional matchups (think Portland and Oklahoma City), zipping in for two-, three- or even four-game series makes a lot of sense. Inevitably these would involve back-to-backs, but they’d be travel-free.
Following a model like this, it seems an NBA schedule that normally takes 177 days to complete (up from 170 two years ago) could be pulled off in more like 155 if the league really wanted – that’s about four games a week, plus a week off for the All-Star Game.
While we’re here, let’s talk about one other wild card: The Canadian government. It’s not clear whether cross-border travel will be kosher by January. Thus, the situation looms where the Raptors could be playing in Buffalo or someplace else, much like the Toronto Blue Jays did.
Sometime in December — Figure out the G League
Remember them? The NBA has a bigger commitment to the G League now that it plans to have its own L.A.-based developmental team called NBA G League Ignite. They shelled out some big money to lure top teenage talent like Jalen Green, Isaiah Todd, Daishen Nix and Kai Sotto, and hiring Brian Shaw to coach them.
Now what? Will they have any games to play? And what happens to the rest of the league, while we’re at it? This has some impacts at the NBA level, too, most notably for the league’s 2-way players. Additionally, the G League had been planning to launch a team in Mexico City this year — surely that seems a pipe dream now. And, as above, dealing with the Raptors 905 team adds another layer of complexity due to the border.
One wonders if a shorter schedule with intermittent bubbles might be practical for the G League. They’re not getting any fan revenue either way, but something built on the premise of the G League Showcase but running longer and reconvening multiple times could be a potential path forward.
Jan. 18 — NBA season starts?
This is the new target open date for the league, after having already pushed back from earlier soft targets of Dec. 1 and Dec. 25.
Subjectively, I think this one has a better chance to stick. For starters, I’ve heard people in the league talking about a potential MLK date for a while, even as the “official” word was targeting December.
Logistically, this seems about the limit of how far they want to push the date back. Going any later moves the bulk of the playoffs deeper into summer and perhaps even into competing with the NFL, like it did this year. Plus, there’s an accordion effect on the following season as well – at some point, the league needs to get back to something closer to its normal schedule.
As I mentioned above, a 150-day season is about the theoretical limit for an 82-game schedule with limited travel. (I mean, technically, you could do it in 82 days, but I don’t think we really want to try that). So you’re looking at completing the regular-season on or around June 20.
Why is that date important?
For two reasons. First of all, it keeps alive the possibility of the league’s elite players participating in the Olympics. I mean, who knows if the Olympics even happen, but if they do it keeps alive the chance of participating for the NBA players who don’t make the second round of the playoffs. (The Olympics are scheduled to begin July 23, 2021 in Tokyo).
Additionally, this limits the amount of series going head to head against the Olympics themselves. While playing concurrently with the Olympics is likely unavoidable, it’s probably manageable if one live conference finals game a day is going head to head against a tape-delayed Olympic event. (Japan is 13 hours ahead of the Eastern time zone).
However, the Olympics remain secondary to the biggest carrot: Getting the Finals over and done before the NFL starts. We normally take about two months to go through the playoffs, and whether it happens in a bubble or out in the real world doesn’t shift the time frame much — nobody wants back-to-backs in the postseason.
Thus, getting the regular season done in late June means the Finals are complete by the end of August. Again, finishing earlier rather than later also makes it a lot easier to shift to a more normal calendar in 2021-22.
Finally, the league has always owned MLK Day, so it’s a perfect time to open. The NFL will be all but over, putting the NBA in the national spotlight for the bulk of its season.
Late August 2021? — Crown a champion and do this again
We’re just getting started here. The league will have to figure out the calendar for 2021-22 as well, including such things as whether to have a summer league, when to start the 2021-22 season and how late to end it, and how to shoehorn the draft and free agency into what’s likely another abbreviated offseason.
As we’re seeing, the impacts of COVID-19 and the resulting hiatus are likely to keep league and Players’ Associations officials busy for several more months. The road forward is still a tricky one to navigate, filled with potential potholes that might not be visible from the current vantage point.
Nonetheless, let’s exhale and celebrate a little. Plan A worked, and the 2019-20 season was completed without incident. Doing the same for 2020-21 won’t be easy, but the NBA has inspired confidence that it can pull this off.
