PHILADELPHIA — In high school, they used to stage these drunken-driving awareness days when we’d all go out in a parking lot and watch a demonstration by experts from some sort of public agency. Because it is generally frowned upon to pass out booze to ninth and 10th graders, the experts always brought with them a device that was supposed to simulate being under the influence. My memory is that the thing looked like the helmet of a space suit, but it could have been a pair of oversize goggles. Whatever the case, the device would distort the wearer’s vision, balance and depth perception to an extent that an otherwise sober person would suddenly become a sloppy, uncoordinated disaster incapable executing any complex motor function.
If you’ve ever played five-on-five basketball after a long layoff, you’ve experienced the sensation in question. One moment, you feel like a reasonably healthy and in-shape human being. The next, you feel like somebody turned up the dial on Earth’s gravitational constant. Your legs respond to your brain as if your nerve pathways have been replaced by carrier pigeons. Your feet respond to your legs as if they’ve spent several hours marinating in Quik-Crete. The whole experience feels a lot doing jumping jacks after sitting on the toilet seat for too long.
There aren’t a lot of moments in life where average ham-and-egger like you and I can relate to finely-tuned professional athletes. But whenever the Sixers return to the court for their first five-on-five workout in more than two months, it should be easy for the rest of us to imagine just how awful they feel.
“It’s definitely going to take some time to ramp up,” Sixers general manager Elton Brand said Tuesday in a conference call with local reporters. “The league, the NBPA, we all have to figure out an amount of time — I don’t know how much time that’s going to be once it’s deemed safe, but we’re definitely going to need some time to get back in the gym, to have time to get your legs back and get your wind back and just have a healthy and safe return once that’s deemed a proper time.”
That’s an uplifting thought, at least for those of us who have spent the last two months watching simulated games on Xbox and gambling on Ukrainian ping-pong. The NBA might still be months away from returning, but the biggest takeaway from Brand’s comments Tuesday is that players and executives are still committed to the resumption of their suspended season. It’s still unclear what form that could take, or even if that commitment extends to the crowning of a traditional champion. But Brand’s words would seem to be a pretty good barometer to measure the overall thinking of the league. Ever since the NBA shut down play following the Sixers’ win over the Pistons on March 11, he and the other 29 general managers have participated in a weekly phone call with Commissioner Adam Silver. This is in addition to his duties on a committee that the NBA formed to help guide its return to play.
“Right now, I’m very hopeful that the season will resume,” Brand said. “We’re looking at all options. It’s too early to speculate on what it’s going to be this year. But it’s going to be based on safety, and to steal a line from Adam Silver directly, it’s going to be based on data, not a date, and we’ll figure out everything from there.”
One big question for us NBA watchers is how to contextualize the end result of whatever portion of the season lies ahead. Would it really be fair — or even possible — to consider whatever champion the league ultimately crowns to have been the true last team standing of the 2019-20 season? Consider one reported scenario that has the NBA pushing back the start of the 2020-21 season to Christmas Day in order to accommodate the end of the ongoing one. Such a timetable could conceivably allow the league to stage most if not all of the games that remained on its schedule when play was interrupted by COVID-19 and the dawn of social distancing.
At the time the hiatus began, there were roughly three months of competition remaining. If players are able to return to practice facilities and resume on-court activities within the next couple of weeks, it would leave open the possibility of using June for a modified version of training camp that includes a series of “exhibition” matchups that are optimized for TV (e.g., have the best teams in the West face off against the best teams in the East, with one or two nationally-televised games per day). The NBA could then stage the full version of its playoffs in July and August, with the Finals concluding just as the NFL season begins.
Even if such a schedule would not allow for games played in front of fans, it would enable the league to negotiate a one-time television contract with its broadcast partners that could go a long way toward offsetting ticket revenue losses. But would it be possible to consider the undertaking anything other than a season unto itself? By the time play resumed, teams would have been off for nearly four months, which is the length of a normal offseason. Plus, consider a team like the Sixers, which finished Part I of 2019-20 with the best home record in the NBA, but would not have the benefit of playing in front of its home crowd.
For a team that has some significant decisions to make regarding its coaching staff and the composition of its roster, the implications of whatever competition lies between now and the start of 2020-21 are fascinating to consider.
“It’s very hard to speculate on what changes would be made if we don’t have a season,” Brand said. “I can tell you we’re preparing as if the season is coming. I speak to Brett Brown every day still, and he’s preparing for the regular season and playoffs. There are just so many unknowns. He’s prepping, I’m prepping, and I do hope we get a chance to play in some way once it’s deemed safe.”
It might not be pretty at first. The thing about basketball, though, is that it’s always worth the wait.
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