Raptors welcome news of NBA’S return to action
Siakam says team will have no trouble gearing up for playoffs in Orlando bubble
Pascal Siakam isn’t sure he knows what year it is anymore, but he’s aware of one very important change that’s coming.
It’s not official yet, but as with most “secrets” in the NBA, this one didn’t stay secret for very long. The NBA is on its way back to the hardwood.
NBA commissioner Adam
Silver will make it official on Thursday following a board of governors meeting in which a return-to-play plan will be outlined, and if the whisperings are true, rubber stamped.
What we know now, courtesy of ESPN’S Adrian Wojnarowski is it will involve 22 teams, the top nine in the East and the top 13 in the west. All 22 will play eight more games to finish off a regular season, but more importantly, provide a runway the players can use to ramp up for a playoff run.
Without that buildup there would be much more concern for injury. Before entering the NBA bubble that will be confined to a section of Orlando’s Disney World for a training camp, teams will gather at locations of their own choosing for their own pre-training camp, and then make their way to Florida.
The eighth- and ninth-place teams following the completion of eight games per team will face a play-in game, or games, if the ninth place team is within four games of the No. 8 seed at the new conclusion of the regular season.
While travel will obviously be negated with this setup, it does pose its own challenges, not the least of which is staying in the same hotel in a confined area within Disney — albeit a luxury locale — for up to three consecutive months.
The normal playoff grind — winning 16 games over a twomonth period with cross-country travel — isn’t easy, but at least there’s variety. That will be very much lacking for the teams that make it to the very end of the line sometime around Oct 12.
Siakam was just hearing the details of the reopening by the time he talked to reporters on Wednesday, so he hadn’t really formed an opinion on the plan one way or the other, but he was sure of one thing.
“I just want to see it unfold a little bit more, have a bit more information about how it’s going to happen and what’s going to be done,” Siakam said. “Maybe I’ll have more then, but obviously it’s good that the NBA is going to be back, that’s the good news.”
And while Siakam has done his work to stay in the best shape possible considering he got access to the team practice court only a couple of weeks ago, he’s confident he and his teammates will get there by the time the games begin again, on or about July 31.
There’s been a lot of blood, sweat and tears gone into the whole season.
“For me, at the end of the day, I’ll do anything that I can to help my team win, and if that’s staying somewhere for three months again, I’m sure I’ll be OK managing it,” he said. “We’ll see, we never know, but I’m trying just to be open and have a good mindset about everything and be positive.”
Siakam has very few worries about his team’s readiness to jump back into the fray. The Raptors were on a nice role when the coronavirus pandemic shut down the league on March 11.
They had just finished up a five-game west coast road trip, having won the last four outings, and were on the cusp of getting healthy for one of the few times all season. Then the league shut down, and here we are, almost three months later, finally talking about a solid plan to return and defend the title.
“Obviously you don’t want your season to just go to waste. There’s been a lot of blood, sweat and tears gone into the whole season,” Siakam said.
“Obviously we don’t want to see it end like that, so we want to be able to play and continue to move forward, and hopefully that can happen, and we’re excited about attacking that other title.”