NBA News and Notes
The NBA has been on pause since March 12 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic that invaded the sports world when Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell of the Utah Jazz tested positive, leading to their game against the Thunder being postponed. Since that point in time, the league and the NBA Players Association have been busy trying to hammer out the best potential deal to get back to playing basketball. With a vote pending Thursday for hammering out the restart of the 2019-20 campaign, there is more information coming out about the potential logistics involved for the eventual crowning of a champion.
According to Keith Smith of Yahoo! Sports, the league is looking at Coronado Springs Resort on the grounds of Walt Disney World for the main choice to house players and other personnel for the restarted season. The potential for other resorts on the complex is there but the Coronado Springs Resort offers the most rooms, in addition to being located close to the Wide World of Sports Complex where the games are expected to take place. In addition, the Wide World of Sports complex has ultra-high speed fiberoptic connections to ESPN’s home office in Bristol, Connecticut. Seeing that ESPN is one of the major broadcast partners of the league, that will prove to be critical when it comes to the televising of contests.
In addition to that, it was reported by Adrian Wojnarowski that the NBA is strongly looking at a 22-team postseason field. Under that premise, 13 teams from the Western Conference and nine from the Eastern Conference would get into the field. That would bring the Pelicans, Trail Blazers, Spurs, Kings and Suns from the Western Conference along with the Wizards from the Eastern Conference as far as teams that would be on the outside looking in had this one actually been a regular 16-team playoff field. It’s unclear to see how things will pan out with the expanded field but seeing how each of those teams were within six games of the final playoff spot with 15 to 18 games to go in the regular season when it was paused, it makes the most sense.
In addition, on Get Up Tuesday morning on ESPN, Wojnarowski pretty much said that commissioner Adam Silver will drive the ship when it comes to determining how things will look and play out going forward. “The Board of Governors are going to pass whatever the plan that Adam Silver and the Players Association bring them. They have zeroed in on a 22-team format, likely the 16 teams that are in the playoff, 1-8 in both conferences right now, and then six more teams, likely five in the Western Conference, one in the East, Washington.”
As it stands currently, Disney World, and the other Walt Disney parks, are slated to open on July 11 in a limited fashion. Having the NBA there would be a major boost to the Walt Disney umbrella and it gives the NBA as perfect a place as you’re going to find to run the rest of a potential season, including the playoffs. There’s plenty of hotel rooms, top-notch service and things that can potentially keep family occupied, in addition to giving players a distraction during the times when they aren’t playing games. In addition, the deal would be huge for the company thanks to ESPN being able to televise games. It was estimated the network would lose nearly a half billion dollars in ad revenue if the playoffs didn’t take place.
The NBA is angling for a start of training camp in the coming weeks once the deal is fully hammered out. With that timeline, the premise is for the league to start holding games sometime in the month of July.