Olympic mess: Silver assumes NBA won’t stop during Games

The NBA is about to complete the resolution of the 2019-20 season in the Walt Disney World bubble, a tremendous organizational and sanitary success that has saved the furniture of a campaign obviously marked, like all world sport, by the pandemic. It was the first major league to close, on March 11, and the matches officially returned on July 30. In total, more than four months of forced interruption that have caused an obvious mismatch in the schedule. The final will end (at least on Friday) after the first week of October, close to the dates on which, without COVID-19, the 2020-21 course would have started.

This forced readjustment in the calendar will, of course, be transferred to a next season that still does not have dates or a defined plan. The NBA set itself the goal of completing this resumption of the bubble before airing concrete data on the future. But there is a very clear starting point: try to make the season have the greatest sense of normality that can be recovered, avoid bubble formats as much as possible and save time so that the largest possible stretch of the competitive calendar can be covered with an audience in the stands. If to that is added the rest that the players who have played these 2020 playoffs will need, the result is that even the rumored start on the designated Christmas day seems premature. It is spoken, in a way that seems more plausible, of January, February and even (this an option too distant, in principle) March. Commissioner Adam Silver pointed in this direction in an interview with NBATV: “My feeling is that although it will continue to be the 2020-21 season, there will be no competition until 2021. We said we couldn’t start before Christmas, but the more we analyze and the more we listen to the experts, I think it will make more sense to get into the month of January”.

The stop is not a realistic option

The economic losses would be drastically smoothed out as soon as teams were able to let their fans into the pavilions. And although the NBA has so far rejected a definitive change in its schedule, it is obvious that it will take a transition period to regain the October-June format in which it is traditionally played. So next season will be atypical. And that, and in a sport like basketball it is a dramatic problem, will make the NBA calendar coincide, with absolute certainty, with the Tokyo Olympics, which were postponed last summer, also due to the pandemic, and which will be held from July 23 to August 8, 2021. The hiatus of the NBA season never seemed a very realistic possibility, and Silver has made it clear that they do not contemplate it : “We will have to consider it but I don’t really see it as probable. If the season starts later, I do not see feasible that we stop during the Games. It is not just the weeks of Olympic competition, the players would have a previous concentration and would need a rest time afterwards ”.

The date mess for the NBA would be tremendous if, in addition to all his current circumstances, he had to stop between July and August. And, in any case, Nor does it seem likely that franchises will let their big stars go with the consequent risk of injury and physical problems. The disaster, if both competitions overlap and the NBA stay in their teams, it would be huge and global for Olympic basketball. In addition to Team USA, the United States team that wanted to build a great team after their fiasco in the last World Cup in China, the great teams of the world would be affected: When this NBA season started, there were 108 non-US players on the rosters of all 30 franchises, including -of course- practically all the best players in the world:

“There is so much talent that I think the US could have a competitive team, but I’m more concerned about some of the other selections. Because their big stars are in our League and his absence would be a great handicap for them. All that said, the circumstances are so exceptional that it is impossible to know how things will be next summer. These are times when traditional norms disappear and everyone has to adapt, ”Adam Silver concluded.

Some pre-Olympic also in the spotlight

The problem does not only affect the Games, but also extends to the pre-Olympic tournaments from which the last four places distributed by basketball will come. These will be played from June 29 to July 4 and include great teams and world basketball classics who also seem doomed to play the Olympic position without their big stars. This is the case of Luka Doncic’s Slovenia, who has not played for his team since winning the Eurobasket 2017. But also Lithuania (it would be without Sabonis and Valanciunas), Serbia (Nikola Jokic, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Nemanja Bjeliça, Boban Marjanovic) , Italy (Danilo Gallinari, Marco Belinelli), Germany (Dennis Schröder, Daniel Theis, Maxi Kleber), Croatia (Bogdan Bogdanovic, Dario Saric, Ivica Zubac), Greece (Giannis Antetokounmpo), Turkey (Cedi Osman, Ersan Ilyasova, Furkan Korkmaz ), Czech Republic (Tomas Satoransky), Dominican Republic (Al Horford, Karl-Anthony Towns) or Canada, a team that could be one of the most attractive in the world if it could count on its current generation of NBA players: RJ Barrett, Jamal Murray, Tristan Thompson, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Brandon Clarke, Dillon Brooks, Chris Boucher, Kelly Olynyk, Dwight Powell, Andrew Wiggins…

That is for the pre-Olympics. The eight teams already qualified (Japan, USA, Argentina, Spain, France, Nigeria, Iran, Australia) they would also have serious problems without their NBA. It is obvious in the case of the United States; but, furthermore, this past season Spain has had Ricky Rubio, Marc Gasol, Serge Ibaka and the Hernangómez brothers, Willy and Juancho in the US League. Japan, the host, would be left without their new big star, Rui Hachimura. And the blow would also be very hard for Australia (Aaron Baynes, Matthew Dellavedova, Dante Exum, Joe Ingles, Patty Mills, Ben Simmons …) or France (Niko Batum, Sekou Doumbouya, Rudy Gobert, Frank Ntilikina, Vincent Poirier, Evan Fournier …) .