Make good of bad situation
With NBA on pause, it might be time for league to reimagine itself.
It was a stunningly honest and direct admission from one of the most powerful voices in professional sports.
Adam Silver was just like us. He did not know when normal would become normal again.
He was anxiously waiting for a breakthrough.
And the NBA commissioner knew that his league wouldn’t be able to move forward until America and the world did the same.
“We’re going to try by every means we can to play basketball,” Silver said Wednesday during an interview with ESPN. “The safety of our players is first — and our fans. That will be the condition in which we can play: When public health officials give us the OK.”
With each passing hour, day and week, a return to OK increasingly feels like it’s going to take a while.
Normally, we would say that we need sports back in our lives.
Nothing is normal right now. Which means Silver could say this, and it felt normal.
“We have to be thinking what the right balance is,” he said. “I know, of course, it is the obligation of government officials (to determine) when will it be OK to sort of come back out of our homes and re-engage with each other. When I look at the options, maybe we can do this incrementally. The first step isn’t games with thousands of people in the arena. Maybe it’s just games.”
Whatever it takes, just come back. Please.
The James Harden-Russell Westbrook Rockets remain stuck at 40-24, paired with Chris Paul’s Oklahoma City Thunder and tied for fifth place in the Western Conference. (The Thunder get the tiebreaker for playoff seeding.)
By Sunday night, five scheduled Rockets games — postponed, potentially never to be played — will have passed since the NBA suddenly paused its season March 11, knocking down a surreal row of dominoes that is still collapsing in our coronavirus world.
Silver’s tease of a potential charity game received the most attention from media and fans. That’s how it goes when the stock market keeps tumbling, some political leaders keep fumbling and already played NBA/ MLB/NFL/college games dominate sports TV.
“People are stuck at home,” Silver said. “They need a diversion. They need to be entertained.”
Entertained: That’s a word we haven’t heard in a while.
The NBA should embrace the potential hidden within these chaotic, unprecedented times.
Change the league. For the better.
1.) Start the next season on Christmas Day. Then start every season that follows on the same day. Happy holidays.
2.) Cut down the first round of the playoffs to five games. The first round, normally, is pointless. At worst, the on-court competition will increase.
3.) Cut down the remainder of this regular season to 10 games, removing eight contests from the Rockets’ schedule. When the 2020-21 campaign starts Dec. 25, begin a 70-game regular season that runs through June.
4.) Hold a best-of-three, endof-season tournament for the No. 8 seed in each conference. More competition, less tanking.
5.) Be creative and inventive. Leap forward into a new era for The Association. I’m sure Twitter has even better ideas about improving a league that, in many ways, is run by its social-media savvy superstars.
Players testing positive for the coronavirus and team facilities being shut down have dominated recent news cycles. But if our world returns to normal by June (it’s late March right now — crazy, I know) the NBA will be perfectly positioned to carry us through the gradual transition.
LeBron James will be the most interesting man on television. Giannis Antetokounmpo will lead the NBA-best Milwaukee Bucks. Big cities and small markets across the country will unite, and the world will tune in nightly to watch the athletic definition of must-see TV.
Now remember that MLB, theoretically, will just be getting started and still have 162 or so regular-season games to play. And that the NFL and college football will still be dormant.
The NBA will own the American sports world. Then it can significantly improve itself for the long term by altering the athletic calendar and giving fall to football. The biggest daily sport from December through August: The NBA.
Normal will return, some day. When it does, hopefully the NBA will have made the best out of its downtime.
We’ll need something to get us excited about the possibilities of life again.