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We passed the one-month marker without N.B.A. basketball on Saturday. Playoff games were supposed to start this Saturday, but no one can say yet how soon, or even if, they will happen in 2020.
It nonetheless feels appropriate, 35 days and counting into the N.B.A.’s shutdown, to summarize what we do know about the state of the league and what Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks’ owner, has taken to calling “the new abnormal.”
Firm declarations about the fate of the rest of the season are not guaranteed on May 1.
The reality is that it will most likely take longer than that for league officials to have clarity about whether they can bring the 2019-20 season to some sort of legitimate conclusion.
If you can permit a football analogy from a basketball scribe, goal posts nationwide are still moving too fast and too frequently for the N.B.A. to know if restarting play in the July 1 range and then playing through to early September will be feasible. It just is not possible, or even appropriate in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, to make binding projections about a summer return when the country remains in such a widespread state of lockdown.
Commissioner Adam Silver said as much during his April 6 interview with Turner’s Ernie Johnson, but the second half of this statement received much less attention than the first.
“Essentially, what I’ve told my folks over the last week is that we should just accept that, at least for the month of April, we won’t be in a position to make any decisions,” Silver said. “And I don’t think that necessarily means on May 1 we will be.”
The N.B.A. should benefit from being able to study the comebacks of major sports leagues in other countries.
The Chinese Basketball Association had initially hoped to split its 20 teams evenly and send them to two cities by now for closed-door games to resume its suspended season. That plan has been delayed indefinitely by the Chinese government, which appears to fear another serious coronavirus outbreak. Even though a handful of American players — including Jeremy Lin, Lance Stephenson and O.J. Mayo — have been summoned back to China in recent weeks in anticipation of a reboot, ESPN reported Tuesday that C.B.A. play had been placed on hold until July.
Yet there is at least one major soccer league — Germany’s Bundesliga — on course to resume its season before the N.B.A. does. That would provide some valuable anecdotal data for Silver’s league to study.
Our Tariq Panja reported last week on the Bundesliga’s plans to restart in May, with teams in Germany’s top two divisions already practicing and preparing for a return in their own stadiums, albeit without fans. Germany’s health care system and testing regimens have been the most successful in Europe, but a similar push for the English Premier League to follow suit in June, advisable or not, is gathering steam.
I reported last week on Taiwan’s smaller-scale Super Basketball League, which has completed its regular season without interruption and is moving into the playoffs. It’s only a five-team league, in another country that has not been ravaged by the coronavirus in a manner anywhere near like that in the United States, but it does provide the N.B.A. with a glimpse of what games look like at a centralized site (as they might in a Las Vegas “bubble” scenario) and how they function in a controlled environment.
Athletic training staffs will want about six weeks to get players ready for game action after such a long layoff — but they know the ramp-up period is most likely going to be shorter.
The N.B.A. has repeatedly made it clear that it needs the approval of government and public health officials to resume operations. If you wish to maintain an optimistic tone amid the mounting pessimism in league circles and imagine such approval could be granted as early as June 1, that would still mean nearly three full months of inactivity for N.B.A. players.
David Griffin, the executive vice president of basketball operations for the New Orleans Pelicans, neatly summed up the challenges posed by such a lengthy shutdown during a recent conference call with reporters.
“I think there would be a pretty unanimous sentiment that the longer we’re out,” Griffin said, “the longer we’re going to need.”
Based on the best current estimates, though, four to five weeks for teams to fully reintegrate their players is likely to be the longest warm-up period that would be granted since it is widely believed that the N.B.A. would like to stage at least a few regular-season games before moving into the playoffs, to try to satisfy agreements with regional television partners but also to give all 30 teams a chance to participate.
That would most likely include a preliminary runway of up to two weeks for players to get back into team training facilities and start working their way up to participating in what Griffin described as “more explosive activities.”
It will be a long, long time before basketball can be played in front of fans.
Even in Germany, where the Bundesliga looks closer to game action than any other sports league of stature, there is little hope for fans being part of sporting events any time soon. Christian Seifert, the chief executive of the Bundesliga, told The New York Times last week that he expected games to be staged for TV only — without in-person fans — through the end of 2020.
Just as the events of Sept. 11, 2001, changed air travel forever, many industry experts expect the arena experience to be affected drastically by the coronavirus crisis. Other aspects of daily life will certainly be affected as well, but it is natural for our purposes to wonder, for starters, how soon N.B.A. fans will even be willing to return to stadiums before they have access to a coronavirus vaccine.
Cuban said Sunday in a Fox News appearance that he anticipated “a lot of trepidation” that would “lead to people holding back and not spending money.”
“People aren’t going to just venture outside,” Cuban said. “They’re not going to go to large gatherings. They’re not going to feel confident right off the bat.”
There is no mechanism in the N.B.A.’s bylaws to anoint a champion without the playoffs.
The Milwaukee Bucks held the league’s best record (53-12) when the N.B.A. abruptly ended its season on March 11. Don’t expect them to be rewarded for it in any meaningful way if the league is ultimately forced to cancel the rest of the season.
Although the N.B.A. has adopted an anything-goes mentality in fielding proposals for new ideas — “We’re in listening mode right now,” Silver said — some sort of vote would be required to name a champion without a postseason. You can safely assume (nothing personal, Milwaukee) that no team is going to be crowned a champion that way.
The fill-in basketball programming has flopped.
Players facing off in televised NBA 2K video games. A H-O-R-S-E competition featuring current (and retired) N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. stars via video streams from the shooters’ locations.
These were sensible ideas to try to fill the void many of us feel with no live basketball to consume.
Execution, watchability and competition intensity, however, were all sorely lacking, to put it charitably, for both endeavors. “The Last Dance,” ESPN’s 10-part documentary series on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, debuts Sunday — and can’t start soon enough.
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Corner Three
You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line. Letters may be lightly edited.
Q: Given that the N.B.A. has already named major trophies for Maurice Podoloff, Larry O’Brien, Bill Russell and Kobe Bryant, what will the league name after David Stern? The former commissioner clearly deserves a major honor. Naming the Olympic gold medal in basketball after him would be fitting, but there is no precedent for that. — David Machlowitz (Westfield, N.J.)
Stein: That’s quite a question, David. I can’t see I say a clear-cut answer, either.
As you pointed out, four major N.B.A. honors — the regular-season Most Valuable Player Award (Podoloff), the champion (O’Brien), the finals M.V.P. (Russell) and the All-Star M.V.P. (Bryant) — have already been dedicated to legends of the sport. The N.B.A. will naturally seek to honor Stern’s considerable contributions over nearly five decades. But the league has zero jurisdiction over Olympic basketball and doesn’t appear to have a clear-cut direction for finding a form of recognition commensurate with Stern’s legacy.
N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver has hypothetically suggested calling his proposed in-season, soccer-style cup competition “The Stern Cup” in some past interviews. One complication is that any in-season tournament — even if Silver can work it into the N.B.A. schedule soon — would presumably begin on a trial basis. I struggle to imagine the league naming something after Stern that could be canceled.
You’ve stumped me with this one. So let’s open the floor to suggestions that anyone in our newsletter community can send to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com.
Q: Are the games streaming? — @BreakItBrett from Twitter
Stein: This one, actually posed by several readers, came in response to Sunday’s story on Taiwan’s five-team Super Basketball League — home to the only professional basketball “bubble” currently believed to be in operation. I was expecting some follow-up curiosity about the S.B.L., no matter how far off your radar that league was, since there is such a shortage of live viewing options now for sports fans worldwide.
Some good news we can pass along is that S.B.L. games are indeed easy to find. The Eleven Sports network in Taiwan is showing S.B.L. games live via Twitch (along with Taiwanese baseball), and even archives them for those who may struggle with the time difference (12 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time).
Why not give streaming a try? After a month’s worth of replayed classics from every conceivable sports network, it would be nice to sample something sporty on TV that can deliver an outcome we don’t all know in advance.
The S.B.L. playoffs began Tuesday with the team featured in our story (Taoyuan Pauian Archiland) losing the opener to the Yulon Luxgen Dinos in a five-game series. Charles Garcia, Pauian’s star import, was forced to leave the team under tragic circumstances last week, flying back to the United States after the death of his father Charles Garcia Sr., at 59, after kidney failure.
Pauian is coached by Ben Metcalf, a former Orlando Magic video coordinator, but has only one import left on its roster: Edvinas Seskus of Lithuania. Garcia had just joined the team last month, replacing Quincy Miller, who played in the N.B.A. with Denver, Sacramento and Detroit.
Yulon is led by Marcus Keene, who topped the N.C.A.A. in scoring as a 5-foot-9 junior at Central Michigan in 2016-17 (30.0 points per game), and by the 7-foot-5 Sim Bhullar, whose brief stint with the Sacramento Kings in April 2015 made him the first player of Indian descent in N.B.A. history. Bhullar totaled 27 points and 25 rebounds in Game 1 against Pauian.
The winner of the Pauian-Yulon series will advance to the S.B.L. finals against Taiwan Beer — for a seven-game series that, according to league rules, will open with Taiwan Beer holding a 1-0 series lead. Taiwan Beer is led by the left-handed swingman Kentrell Barkley (who played collegiately at East Carolina) and Ukraine power forward Igor Zaytsev.
The former Duke guard Matt Jones played for Taiwan Bank, which did not reach the playoffs.
Q: In the midst of a national health crisis of the first order, your article last week about crowning a 2020 N.B.A. champion bordered on the obscene. Are you serious? Look around. — Roger Panetta
Stein: Your dismay is noted, and I’m sure you’re not alone. Not everyone has the appetite to read about sports and sports issues right now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
But this is a basketball newsletter, and there are readers who do still want basketball coverage. Last week’s newsletter was devoted to a down-the-road issue that the league we cover so closely will face when we emerge from this crisis.
I noted in the piece that it was a trivial topic in light of current events — and, let’s face it, pretty much anything sports-related feels trivial at the moment. But in this tiny corner of the media world, we’re going to keep writing about basketball for those who welcome the diversion, as sportswriters have always done.
Numbers Game
774
If you are looking for interesting rabbit holes to get lost in during these pandemic times, allow me to suggest the buzzer-beaters page that Basketball Reference introduced this season. It lists all 774 shots in N.B.A. history made by players whose teams were tied or trailing in the game’s final seconds and who left no time on the clock after sinking their game winners.
5
There were five such buzzer-beaters this season: Utah’s Bojan Bogdanovic delivered game-winners in November and February — each off a Joe Ingles assist — and is joined in the club with one each by Sacramento’s Nemanja Bjelica, Charlotte’s Malik Monk and Miami’s Jae Crowder (who was with Memphis at the time). Bjelica’s 32-footer in Houston in December was the longest of the five, which can be confirmed in the distance section of Basketball Reference’s wonderfully thorough page.
43
Atlanta’s Vince Carter, who turned 43 in January, is the league’s only active player who was drafted in the 1990s and the only active player born in the 1970s. Carter was the fifth pick in the 1998 draft and joined the Toronto Raptors via a draft-night trade with Golden State, which ended up with Antawn Jamison, Carter’s University of North Carolina teammate.
2
Two of the six best single-season shooting percentages in league history were recorded this season — assuming the regular season is indeed over. The Knicks’ Mitchell Robinson, as noted previously in this section, shot 74.2 percent from the field, which would represent a new league record, surpassing Wilt Chamberlain’s 72.7 percent in 1972-73. But Utah’s Rudy Gobert, shooting almost exclusively at the rim like Robinson, is also close to the rare air of the .700 Club at 69.8 percent in 2019-20. The Nets’ DeAndre Jordan posted three seasons in the 70s for the Clippers (2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17) to occupy the Nos. 3-4-5 slots on the career list.
21
Charles Garcia, who was featured in our piece about Taiwan’s Super Basketball League, has played for 21 teams in his 10-year professional career. He spent time with five teams in the N.B.A. G League, including a 2011 stint with the Iowa Energy when Nick Nurse led the Energy, like the Raptors years later, to a championship. Garcia has also played in Turkey, Mexico, Spain, Puerto Rico, Bahrain, South Korea, Iceland, Japan and the Philippines, in addition to his three stops in Taiwan.
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Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
