League’s owners approve restart plan
Twenty-two teams to play at Disney and finish playoffs by mid-October
NBA owners Thursday overwhelmingly approved the league’s plan to restart the season with 22 teams at Walt Disney World in Florida in July, according to a person familiar with the voting results.
The single-site proposal was ratified by a vote of 29-1, with the Portland Trail Blazers as the sole opposition, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the results publicly. According to league rules, 23 votes in favor from the 30 teams were required to pass the measure put forth by the commissioner of the NBA, Adam Silver.
The NBA would be among the largest and most-watched North American sports leagues to return, following announcements by the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and the National Women’s Soccer League to resume play in the summer in some fashion. The voting results were first reported by The Athletic.
The NBA’s return-to-play plan, approved on what would have been the first day of the Finals for this season, next will be reviewed by the National Basketball Players Association, which has scheduled a virtual meeting with its membership Friday afternoon, according to three people with knowledge of the timetable who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. It was not immediately clear whether the players would be asked to formally vote on the proposal, but the league is hopeful that the close working relationship Oklahoma City’s Chris Paul, the union president, maintains with Silver is indicative of the players’ eventual approval.
To earn one of the 22 invitations to Disney World, teams had to be within six games of a playoff berth as of March 11, when the NBA abruptly suspended the season in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Joining the 16 teams that occupied playoff spots as of that date are five teams from the West (Portland, New Orleans, Sacramento, San Antonio and Phoenix) and Washington in the East.
The season is thus over for Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Golden State, Minnesota and the New York Knicks — teams that may wind up enduring a ninemonth wait for their next competitive game with the NBA considering starting the 2020-21 season Dec. 25, rather than in October.
The NBA settled upon 22 teams after ruling out including all 30, to reduce the number of people entering its planned safety bubble in Florida. The league spent much of May looking for a compromise, ranging from 20 to 24 teams, after deciding that a 16team field that proceeded straight to the playoffs was unfair to a handful of teams that were within range of a playoff berth when play was suspended and potentially damaging to the quality of play.
The league settled on 22 teams last week, for competitive and financial reasons. Having that many teams participate will enable the NBA to stage 88 regular-season games without fans — eight for each team — and potentially up to four playoff play-in games before the postseason. Those games will help several teams satisfy local television contracts and thus lessen some of the revenue losses incurred league-wide this season.
After the regular-season games, teams that finish ninth in the East and West will be granted an opportunity to face the No. 8 seed in a play-in round as long as they are no more than four games back — with two consecutive wins required for No. 9 to wrest the final playoff spot away in each conference. The league will proceed from there with its standard playoff format, featuring four best-of-seven playoff rounds with seeding from 1 to 8 in the East and West, which could take the season from a restart date of July 31 into mid-October.