NBA The teams open the preseason with the first individual training sessions
AFP
Ngoodbye among the players of the NBA He wanted to go back to training until the Christmas holidays and to start the regular season starting in the middle of January 2021.
But when NBA commissioner Adam Silver put on the table the dilemma of more rest or suffer losses of between 500 and 1 billion dollars, which will directly affect their salaries in the coming years, the feeling changed completely and from December 1 training camps will open.
The start of preparations for the shortened 2020-21 season, with 72 matches instead of the traditional 82, allow the 30 teams to start the regular competition from the next December 22th.
After having completed a 2019-20 season, which as of March 13, became a unique experience, due to the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the need to wrap up in the Orlando bubble and with an asterisk in the historical reference, that of 2020-21 is also presented loaded with contrasts, questions and serious economic problems.
The current league champions, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Miami Heat, who were their rivals in the fight for the title, return to the training sessions with the least rest in NBA history, while the eight teams that weren’t in Orlando’s bubble with the biggest, since they haven’t played since March.
Some teams haven’t played since March 11. Others resumed the league in July, ended it in August or September, while Lakers and Heat competed until mid-October.
Given this reality, the preparation work will also be atypical, given that it will be carried out in limited individual training sessions and only for those players who have obtained three negative results of coronavirus tests in the last days.
The Mandatory “group training activities”, another way of describing what would otherwise be called normal training, will not start in some cities until next day 4 and the league hopes that by Sunday all teams will have started.
Through social networks, as always happens, there are players who feel excited about being able to return to the competition, but especially some of the teams that have not seen action since last March.
Those who are guaranteed all participants in training, both players and coaches and the staff who help them are a daily screening for coronavirus across the league, and a positive test would cost you not just missing training camps but preseason, scheduled from December 12 to 19.
The rules are so strict that teams can’t even have a team dinner on the eve of training ground. The NBA will not allow them to take place until at least December 11, or the beginning of Phase 4 in the plan of five that the league has established in its health and safety guide in order to protect itself from the coronavirus pandemic. .
The primary goal of the NBA is to provide the players with the greatest protection from COVID-19 and even more so now that the vaccine is getting closer and closer.
A schedule for the first half of the regular season may emerge in the coming days, and many teams are still deciding whether or not they can start the season with fans in their fields.
The Lakers have already said they won’t have fans at Staples Center at the start of the season, the same as the Charlotte Hornets and Oklahoma City Thunder are planning to do, while the Utah Jazz were the only ones to have a reduced number of 1,500 spectators in the stands.
But all the team managers agree that they are going to face a great challenge to ensure that the players can stay free from the contagion of COVID-19 with a complicated and difficult schedule.
In addition, in the sports section, there will be no less than nine teams that will start the season with a new coach on the bench.
Be the case of Filadelfia (Doc Rivers), Los Angeles Clippers (Tyronn Lue), Stephen Silas (Houston), Nate Bjorkgren (Indiana), Billy Donovan (Chicago), Tom Thibodeau (New York Knicks), Steve Nash (Brooklyn-Nets), Mark Daigneault (Oklahoma City) y Stan Van Gundy (Nueva Orleans), all a demonstration of the crisis of game that occurs within the NBA.
It will also be JB Bickerstaff’s first permanent coach training camp in Cleveland, where he took over the team as an interim last February.
For all of them as for those who continue in their positions, the return to work in the NBA, in December, can only be seen as a complete “abnormality.”
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