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| KNBR |
| @KNBR |
Mike Florio believes Kirk Cousins remains an option to replace Jimmy Garoppoloknbr.com/?p=8120
NOW THE RPLACE JIMMY LIST IS:
- ROOKIE IF THINGS KEEP GOING BAD: TREVOR, JUSTIN FIELDS, TREY LANCE
-COUSINS
-AARON RODGERS
-MATT RYAN
| The Athletic NBA |
| @TheAthleticNB |
• Reduce travel
• Play 82 games in less time
• Reduce COVID-19 infection exposure
@johnhollinger
theathletic.com/
LOOK AT THIS LIST:
Early-mid November — Determine the 2020-21 salary cap and reset player option dates
The biggest and most important milestone for the league will be agreeing with the Players’ Association on next season’s salary cap. There is a lot more that goes into it than just selecting a random number, as they need to come to agreements on how much to withhold from player salaries in the near-certain event of a revenue shortfall, and to make some headway on a potential cap number for 2021-22.
Along with that, the league will need to rewrite all of the player options, team options and partial guarantee dates in every NBA contract for 2020-21 to reflect the revised offseason calendar. This was already done once, shortly before the resumption of play in the bubble, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to repeat. With the draft likely pegged at Nov. 18 (see below), the league just needs to nail down the date free agency begins and then it can get to work on the options.
Nov. 18 — NBA draft
Here’s the one known marker on the NBA calendar right now: The draft will definitely happen on Nov. 18. Part of the prep is ongoing: Already a “virtual combine” is underway that consists of 30-minute Zoom interviews between players and teams and, more important, in-person medical testing and measurements. The measurements and medical are the most likely things to move prospects up and down draft boards in the next month.
Late November — Announce when next season starts
The league said it would provide eight weeks notice ahead of whenever the next season is set to begin, so if you work backward from the current hope of Jan. 18, that would involve the league committing to this date on Nov. 23. One hopes that the league will feel good enough about this date to commit to it a little over a month from now, but for a variety of reasons I’ll get into below, it sure seems like Martin Luther King Day is the sweet spot for opening day.
If, for some reason, we haven’t heard anything by Thanksgiving, it’s a red flag that the Jan. 18 date is in peril, and we could be looking at starting in February or even March.
Late November or Dec. 1 — Free agency
The league’s stated aim is to begin free agency on or before Dec. 1. This would give teams and agents a couple of weeks of runway from when the next year’s cap number is known to when they have to commit to deals for the following season.
Since no execs really want to deal with this stuff on Thanksgiving, and the league probably can dominate the media conversation much better by having free agency happen the following week, my guess is that the starter gun for free agency goes off on the afternoon of Nov. 30. If so, that gives us a nice three-week frenzy to sign players before Christmas, and then everybody has to turn around and get ready for training camp.
December — Make the schedule
For those of you who have never been part of this fun, let me assure you there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes in designing the layout of an 82-game season. Normally it takes several months, but the league is working on a compressed timeline.
And this time, the league is trying to achieve several aims simultaneously:
- Reduce travel
- Play 82 games in less time
- Reduce COVID-19 infection exposure
Jan. 18 — NBA season starts?
This is the new target open date for the league, after having already pushed back from earlier soft targets of Dec. 1 and Dec. 25.
Subjectively, I think this one has a better chance to stick. For starters, I’ve heard people in the league talking about a potential MLK date for a while, even as the “official” word was targeting December.
Logistically, this seems about the limit of how far they want to push the date back. Going any later moves the bulk of the playoffs deeper into summer and perhaps even into competing with the NFL, like it did this year. Plus, there’s an accordion effect on the following season as well – at some point, the league needs to get back to something closer to its normal schedule.
As I mentioned above, a 150-day season is about the theoretical limit for an 82-game schedule with limited travel. (I mean, technically, you could do it in 82 days, but I don’t think we really want to try that). So you’re looking at completing the regular-season on or around June 20.
Why is that date important?
For two reasons. First of all, it keeps alive the possibility of the league’s elite players participating in the Olympics. I mean, who knows if the Olympics even happen, but if they do it keeps alive the chance of participating for the NBA players who don’t make the second round of the playoffs. (The Olympics are scheduled to begin July 23, 2021 in Tokyo).
Additionally, this limits the amount of series going head to head against the Olympics themselves. While playing concurrently with the Olympics is likely unavoidable, it’s probably manageable if one live conference finals game a day is going head to head against a tape-delayed Olympic event. (Japan is 13 hours ahead of the Eastern time zone).
However, the Olympics remain secondary to the biggest carrot: Getting the Finals over and done before the NFL starts. We normally take about two months to go through the playoffs, and whether it happens in a bubble or out in the real world doesn’t shift the time frame much — nobody wants back-to-backs in the postseason.
Thus, getting the regular season done in late June means the Finals are complete by the end of August. Again, finishing earlier rather than later also makes it a lot easier to shift to a more normal calendar in 2021-22.
Finally, the league has always owned MLK Day, so it’s a perfect time to open. The NFL will be all but over, putting the NBA in the national spotlight for the bulk of its season.
Late August 2021? — Crown a champion and do this again
We’re just getting started here. The league will have to figure out the calendar for 2021-22 as well, including such things as whether to have a summer league, when to start the 2021-22 season and how late to end it, and how to shoehorn the draft and free agency into what’s likely another abbreviated offseason.
As we’re seeing, the impacts of COVID-19 and the resulting hiatus are likely to keep league and Players’ Associations officials busy for several more months. The road forward is still a tricky one to navigate, filled with potential potholes that might not be visible from the current vantage point.
Nonetheless, let’s exhale and celebrate a little. Plan A worked, and the 2019-20 season was completed without incident. Doing the same for 2020-21 won’t be easy, but the NBA has inspired confidence that it can pull this off.
| New York Post |
| @nypost |
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