Teams Frustrated By Lack Of Info From NBA On Restart
It wasn’t long ago that NBA teams and players were expecting the 2020/21 season to begin sometime in the new year, perhaps even as late as March. However, after the league changed course last month and proposed a pre-Christmas restart, those teams are now preparing for free agency to begin in a week and for the regular season to tip off in less than six weeks.
With things moving so quickly, teams feel frustrated by the lack of information and clarity they’ve received from the NBA about how everything will work, writes Tim Bontemps of ESPN.
The league still has to finalize several short-term logistical details for the offseason, like when player and team option decisions are due or when trade exceptions will expire. Teams also have a number of questions about the health, safety, and travel protocols for the regular season, and are feeling pressure to figure out their plans for allowing fans into arenas.
“We know it’s hard, and they’re working on a lot of details,” one team president told ESPN. “They are listening to a lot of feedback from all of us. But at times we feel like we’re in the dark and that can get frustrating.”
“Nobody knows the rules,” a separate executive said, “and (the league) is making it up as it goes along.”
As Bontemps points out, when the NBA planned its summer restart to complete the 2019/20 season, it took several months for the league to work out all its safety protocols for the bubble. With no plans to create another bubble for ’20/21, the league and its teams must figure out how they’ll keep players, coaches, and other employees safe as clubs fly all over the country and fans are potentially allowed back into arenas. The timeline to establish all those new protocols is far more compressed than it was earlier this year.
“Everything is happening last minute, in a short period of time,” an Eastern Conference executive told ESPN. “There’s not much time to think through things.”
Warriors Aim To Use Rapid Testing To Open Arena At 50% Capacity
The Warriors are hoping to receive approval from local and state officials – and from the NBA – to reopen Chase Center at 50% capacity for the 2020/21 season, according to Ramona Shelburne of ESPN.
As Shelburne explains, the Warriors have been working since March on a plan – internally called “Operation DubNation” – which involves testing fans for COVID-19 using rapid PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests that return results within 15 minutes and are believed to be about 99% accurate.
The NBA used PCR tests during its restart this summer, but had to wait overnight for the results of those tests. The rapid PCR tests have only emerged in recent months, with three companies receiving FDA approval and ramping up their production to make them more widely available, per Shelburne. The rapid tests are significantly more expensive, but the Warriors are prepared to dedicate $30MM to testing fans, employees, and players this season, according to ESPN.
[RELATED: NBA Sends Teams Memo Outlining Protocols For Hosting Fans]
The Warriors’ proposed plan would call for fans to wear masks and engage in social distancing. The team would also use a “state-of-the-art” air filtration system that’s capable of purging and replacing the building’s air supply up to four times in an hour, says Shelburne.
“I not only want to get this done and show the world how we can do it now, I’m willing to spend the money to do it,” Warriors co-owner Joe Lacob said. “This is a serious, serious problem. It cannot go on for multiple years … because if this were to go on for several years, the NBA is no more.
“You cannot sustain this league with no fans. You can do it for a year. We’ll all get by for a year. But suppose we’re in this situation next year. Now we’re talking some serious, serious financial damage to a lot of people.”
Even if the Warriors are willing to spend the money necessary to conduct rapid coronavirus testing for fans, the most significant roadblock will be getting approval from government officials. As Shelburne notes, California hasn’t approved fans for sporting events in any capacity during the pandemic, and San Francisco recently reinstituted several protocols to curb the spread of the virus. Lacob is hoping to receive approval once state and local officials hear the details of the Warriors’ plan and the science behind it.
“Let us prove the concept. Let us use our money, our resources, our seven-eight months of work, our expertise to prove the concept,” Lacob said. “That’s what I’m trying to get the state, the city and the government to entertain.
“… By springtime, the rapid PCR tests will be manufactured in amounts nearing 100,000 per day by some of these companies. But I’m trying to show the world, trying to show the sports world in particular, and California, a way to do this. A safe way to have people come to an event and be totally safe walking in that building. The numbers bear it out.”
Pacific Notes: Clippers, Lin, Warriors, Staples
The Clippers‘ front office, piloted by president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank, will face some important choices once the offseason kicks off in earnest next week, writes Mirjam Swanson of the Orange County Register. Forwards Montrezl Harrell, Marcus Morris, and JaMychal Green, as well as reserve point guard Reggie Jackson, are all unrestricted free agents.
The Clippers may look to make an upgrade from Jackson. Lakers reserve point guard Rajon Rondo, who is expected to opt-out of his $2.7MM player option this summer, has been discussed as a candidate. The team might also make a bigger move, as Rockets All-Star point guard Russell Westbrook, a Long Beach native and former teammate of Clippers star forward Paul George, has recently sought a trade out of Houston.
There’s more out of the NBA’s Pacific Division:
- Jeremy Lin was spotted working out on an indoor court on the University of San Francisco campus with Warriors players Stephen Curry, Eric Paschall, Kevon Looney, Marquese Chriss and Alen Smailagic, fueling speculation that the free agent point guard might get a look in Golden State, according to Marcus White of NBC Sports Bay Area. Lin most recently suited up for the Beijing Ducks of the CBA during the 2019/20 season. Originally from Palo Alto in Northern California, Lin averaged 22.3 PPG, 5.7 APG and 5.6 RPG for the Ducks.
- In a recent conversation with reporters, Warriors GM Bob Myers commented that league interest in the club’s No. 2 pick this year was “fluctuating,” per Mark Medina of USA Today (Twitter link). The team still has a $17.2MM traded player exception left over from its Andre Iguodala deal in the summer of 2019. “I haven’t been told I can’t use it,” Myers said of the TPE, Anthony Slater of The Athletic tweets. “I haven’t been told I have to use it.”
- Both the Lakers and the Clippers will kick off the 2020/21 NBA season without any fans at their home arena, the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, due to current COVID-19 restrictions on indoor gatherings in LA County, according to Kyle Goon of the Orange County Register.
New York Notes: Knicks, Greer, Nets, Ivey, Stoudemire
Three Knicks employees have tested positive for the coronavirus, prompting the team to temporarily shut down its practice facility while the building gets a “thorough cleaning,” the team announced on Tuesday night in a press release.
The NBA recently allowed teams to begin conducting group workouts at their facilities, though players who are participating in those group activities must return daily negative coronavirus tests. There’s no indication that the Knicks employees who tested positive for COVID-19 were players. However, the temporary shutdown of the team’s facility is an early sign of the challenges the league will face in the coming weeks as teams all over the U.S. ramp up for the 2020/21 season without the safety of a bubble.
Here’s more on the NBA’s two New York teams:
- Larry Greer, who was an assistant coach in Phoenix last season, is joining the Knicks as an advance scout, tweets Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic. Marc Berman of The New York Post first reported that the Knicks may hire Greer, whose brother Andy Greer joined the team as an assistant coach in the summer.
- The Nets have added another coach to Steve Nash‘s staff, announcing (via Twitter) that they’ve hired Royal Ivey as an assistant. Formerly a Knicks player development coach, Ivey is good friends with Brooklyn forward Kevin Durant.
- Alex Schiffer of The Athletic takes an in-depth look at another Nets assistant, exploring why Amar’e Stoudmire is getting into coaching and why he should be a good fit in Brooklyn.
- News that the 2020/21 NBA season will start next month comes at a good time for Nets owner Joe Tsai, according to Brian Lewis of The New York Post, who writes that Tsai recently lost over $1 billion in net worth due to the impact of new China regulations on the value of his company Alibaba.
NBA Sends Teams Memo Outlining Protocols For Hosting Fans
The NBA has sent its 30 teams a memo detailing the tentative protocols for hosting fans in arenas during the 2020/21 season, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic (all Twitter links).
[RELATED: NBA Hopes To Have Some Fans In Arenas To Start Season]
Whether or not teams will be able to fill their arenas to partial capacity will depend in large part on the restrictions imposed by the municipal and state governments in each NBA market. Large-scale gatherings are still prohibited in many areas around the U.S. and the NBA’s protocols and regulations obviously wouldn’t overrule those restrictions.
However, in places where larger gatherings are permitted, the league will have its own protocols in place. According to Charania, some of those – outlined in today’s memo – will be as follows:
- Fans within 30 feet of the courts must register a negative coronavirus test two days prior to the game or – if using a rapid test – on the day of the game.
- Food and beverage won’t be permitted for fans within 30 feet of the court.
- Fans (above the age of two) will be required to wear masks, social-distance, and undergo symptom surveys.
- Teams will have the option of installing plexiglass behind their benches.
- If arena suites are filled to 25% capacity or less, coronavirus testing won’t be required for fans in those suites.
- Teams could fill those suites up to 50% capacity if all fans are tested or if the local county’s COVID-19 numbers meet certain thresholds (a positive test rate of 3% or less, plus a seven-day average of 10 or fewer new cases per 100,000 residents).
With the start of the 2020/21 regular season less than six weeks away, I imagine we’ll soon get further clarity and more official details from the NBA on its healthy and safety protocols for the coming year.
Restart/Financial Notes: Escrow, BoG Call, Player Reactions
About a month after the coronavirus pandemic initially brought the 2019/20 NBA season to a halt, the league and its players reached an agreement to withhold 25% of players’ remaining pay checks in escrow. However, due to the success of the summer restart in Orlando, players will be receiving a significant portion of that withheld salary back.
According to Shams Charania of The Athletic (Twitter link), players will receive a refund worth approximately two-thirds of the amount of their salaries held in escrow. As Charania explains, because the league was able to recoup some revenue during the summer, an additional player escrow of just four percent was required to satisfy the revenue split between the NBA and the players.
While that’s good news for most players, it doesn’t apply to all of them. Most players receive their annual pay in 24 regular installments through November 1, but a small handful of players – including LeBron James and Stephen Curry – negotiated deals that pay them in 12 installments through May 1. Because they’d already received their yearly pay checks by the time the 25% escrow went into effect, they won’t get the same refund as the rest of their fellow players.
Here’s more on the NBA’s plans to restart play next month and the league’s financial situation:
- According to Marc Stein of The New York Times (Twitter link), NBA has scheduled a Board of Governors call for today so that team owners can approve the changes to the Collective Bargaining Agreement and the salary cap for the 2020/21 season that were agreed to on Monday night.
- As we relayed on Monday, a number of health officials around the NBA have concerns about the quick turnaround for the start of next season and the potential injury risk for players. Within his latest newsletter of The New York Times, Stein observes that health experts are also worried about what sort of impact the coronavirus will have on the season now that games are set to be played outside the bubble.
- Michael Scotto of HoopsHype spoke to several players, executives, and agents to get their reactions about the agreement to start the 2020/21 season on December 22. As Scotto details, the players he spoke to unanimously felt good about the deal to artificially keep the cap at $109MM for the coming year. “No one is passing up that money,” one player said. “It’s better than $90MM. As long as guys are in a similar range, everybody is relatively protected, and we can make large amounts of money.”
Health Officials Concerned With December Start
Health officials around the league are concerned how players’ bodies will react to a 72-game season after a reduced offseason, Baxter Holmes of ESPN reports.
Those concerns are ramped up due to travel, rather than playing all the games in one location, as the NBA did during the restart. The lack of travel allowed the players to recover more easily during the restart’s condensed schedule.
The league is expected to make adjustments in the schedule in order to reduce travel. Those adjustments could include playing the same opponent twice in the same city and playing more games against opponents in nearby markets.
The 71-day gap between the last game of the Finals and the projected December 22 start is the shortest offseason in the history of any major sports league, Holmes notes. That could affect how the two conference champions — the Lakers and Heat — approach the first month of the season.
The eight teams that didn’t participate in the restart could also be adversely affected. As unnamed Eastern Conference trainer told Holmes, “They haven’t played competitively since March. How are they (going to) react?”
In a normal offseason, players typically trickle into their team’s practice facility for a few weeks prior to the official start of a month-long training camp. That timeline will now be cut in half, though the NBA has allowed teams to open their facilities for informal workouts.
NBA Hopes To Have Some Fans In Arenas To Start Season
NBA arenas won’t be at full capacity anytime soon, but teams are hoping to get some amount of fans into their buildings for the start of the 2020/21 season, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic (Twitter links).
As Charania explains, the exact restrictions on fan attendance will depend in large part on each NBA city’s local regulations, though the league would also have its own protocols in place related to mask-wearing and social distancing. Courtside seats, for instance, would have to be at least 10 or 12 feet away, sources tell Charania.
Within his preview of the coming offseason, ESPN’s Zach Lowe noted that Warriors officials asked the league on a recent conference call about whether it will be feasible to allow high-paying fans into luxury suites. And Golden State is far from the only team asking those sorts of questions, according to Lowe.
Those luxury suites should provide an avenue for the NBA to get more fans into buildings, per Charania, who says the league would like to have the suites at 25-to-50 percent capacity for the 2020/21 season. The league has estimated that playing the entire season in empty arenas could mean sacrificing about 40% of its usual annual revenue, but selling tickets for some seats and suites would allow teams to recoup at least a little of that lost revenue.
Of course, if a COVID-19 vaccine is approved and becomes widely available at some point in 2021, the NBA could potentially open up a more significant portion of its arenas. In the meantime, the league is expected to explore forms of rapid coronavirus testing as a possible screening method for fans.
And-Ones: Free Agents, Jersey Ads, Bubble, Europe
John Hollinger of The Athletic, who invented the PER stat during his time at ESPN, has developed a new metric called BORD$ that estimates a player’s salary value for the upcoming season. After providing an in-depth explanation of how exactly the BORD$ formula works, Hollinger has applied it to this year’s class of free agent point guards and shooting guards in an attempt to determine which players warrant the biggest investments.
Hollinger’s point guard list doesn’t include a ton of surprises — Fred VanVleet is easily the most valuable free agent at the position, with Mike Conley and Goran Dragic topping the next two tiers. Shabazz Napier, Trey Burke, and Jordan McLaughlin are among the point guards whose projections are higher than you might expect.
Applied to this year’s free agent shooting guards, the results from Hollinger’s metric are more eyebrow-raising. Grizzlies RFA-to-be De’Anthony Melton is considered the top free agent at the position by BORD$, ahead of Bogdan Bogdanovic and Evan Fournier. A pair of Bulls guards, Kris Dunn and Shaquille Harrison, also rank in Hollinger’s top seven FA shooting guards due to their defensive prowess.
Here are more odds and ends from around the basketball world:
- As the NBA considers potential new revenue streams to help offset the losses generated by the coronavirus pandemic, allowing a second advertisement patch on game jerseys is one idea being weighed, according to John Lombardo of SportsBusiness Journal.
- David Aldridge of The Athletic takes an in-depth look at the lessons learned from the NBA’s summer bubble experiment and the takeaways that could carry over to the 2020/21 season. As Aldridge observes, while players and coaches aren’t eager to re-enter a bubble next year, the fact that it worked so well this time around will go a long way toward convincing them it’s worth doing again, if need be — even if it’s just for a short period in the postseason, like Major League Baseball did.
- The coronavirus pandemic has continued to wreak havoc on European basketball leagues that have begun their 2020/21 seasons, as Ken Maguire of The Associated Press writes. Only half of the EuroLeague’s 18 clubs have played a full six-game schedule so far this season, as COVID-19 outbreaks have caused several last-minute postponements.
Play-In Tournament Could Decide Bottom Seeds In Each Conference
A play-in tournament to decide the final two playoff spots in each conference seems likely, Adrian Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe of ESPN report.
The tournament being discussed would include teams with the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th best records. A 7 vs. 8 matchup would decide the No. 7 seed in the conference playoffs. The winner of the 9-10 game would then face the loser of the 7-8 game to decide the No. 8 seed.
The tournament would create another revenue stream for the league, which is trying to find ways to make up for last season’s losses due to the coronavirus pandemic as well as the likelihood of having few or no fans in the stands for at least a portion of next season. Having more teams participate in the proposed format could also decrease some teams’ desire to tank.
There are concerns of unfairly penalizing a team in the No. 7 slot that has a strong record. However, no standings trigger has been discussed to date.
Commissioner Adam Silver said negotiations between the league and Players Association had reached a critical stage with an increasingly short window to reach an agreement to allow for a December 22 start.
In other developments regarding negotiations, per the ESPN duo:
- The league wants to expand guidelines on sports betting, hard alcohol and casinos in order to generate $80-100MM in revenue.
- Significant increases in the escrow withholding on players’ salaries has been discussed. That includes the possibility of spreading out the players’ losses over multiple seasons, most likely three, so that they don’t take such a substantial financial hit in one year. If that’s the case, the salary cap and luxury tax levels would need to be set over the next three years.
- The league recently told teams that 40% of Basketball Related Income (BRI), which is split between the two parties, could be lost without gate receipts this season.