TRAMEL'S TAKE
Could an asterisk come with this NBA restart?
The 1979-80 NBA season consisted of 22 franchises. The Clippers were in San Diego. The Kings were in Kansas City. The Nets were in New Jersey. The Mavericks were in the on-deck circle, awaiting their first season. The Thunder was three decades from staking claim in OKC.
Now everything old is new again.
The NBA board of governors is expected to approve commissioner Adam Silver's plan to jumpstart a season suspended by the coronavirus pandemic, and multiple reports say the revival will include 22 teams.
Not 16, which is the standard number of NBA playoff participants.
Not 30, which is the number of NBA franchises.
Twenty-two, an arbitrary number that could introduce the oft-cited but seldom seen symbol to this starcrossed season: the asterisk.
Professional sports seasons have been delayed and interrupted, but when the trophies were handed
out and the parades conducted and the histories written, asterisks were nowhere to be found.
The 1999 Spurs. The 1982 Redskins. The 1981 Dodgers. No one questions the validity of those championship teams. Gregg Popovich has coached five NBA title teams, not 4½. Joe Gibbs won three Super Bowls, not 2½. Old Dodgers Jerry Reuss, Rick Monday, Steve Yeager and Jay Johnstone recorded “We Are the Champions” 39 Octobers ago and drew eyebrows only for their singing, not their claim.
But the 2020 NBA playoffs could be different, if Silver goes a bridge too far.
The 22-team plan apparently will include a short conclusion to the regular season, perhaps eight games or so per team, about half of what remained, and then some kind of playin tournament to make the 16-team bracket.
If that sounds convoluted and complicated, don't worry. It sounds that way to most fans.
This smacks of the NASCAR restarts when a caution flag arises in the final laps. The greenwhite-checker finish. Gearheads know what it all means, but it's confusing to the rest of us.
Same with this NBA restart, if it's 22 teams strong. The majority of basketball fans — you know, the people who can't tell you how to figure true shooting percentage but who loyally watch the games — will be hard-pressed to follow any gimmicky format. They'll just wistfully wait for the normal series so they can be up to speed.
The golf-cut format is Silver's way of trying to be all things to all people.
Some teams don't want to play. Warriors coach Steve Kerr has admitted as much. Teams that are out of the playoff race see little gain in coming back for meaningless games, considering all the hassles that will come with a restart in a DisneyWorld bubble environment.
But just starting with the playoffs, including the 16 teams that were in safe harbor on March 11, when Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus and the NBA suspended the season, has its problems. The NBA needs as much television inventory as possible to counter some of the revenue losses. And the players association apparently wants pre-playoff games included in any restart, to give teams a chance to find their groove.
Networks surely wanted some of the regular season salvaged. They are starving for sports content, and a few weeks of NBA ball would be well-received, even if it was a meaningless Detroit-Charlotte game. Of course, the ratings won't be as robust as they would have been before the reopening of America. So the 22-team format probably is a nod to ESPN and TNT.
Still, start this thing virtually in August with some form of the regular season, and poor ESPN is going to be bottlenecked come September. The NBA. Likely the NFL. Almost surely college football. Heck, maybe the idiots in baseball will have found a clue by then. How will ESPN squeeze all that onto its channels? First, no content. Then, too much.
The 22-team format apparently will include the Western Conference squads still sniffing the playoffs — the Pelicans, Blazers, Spurs, Kings and Suns — plus the Wizards in the East, though Washington was 5½ games out of the playoffs when the season stopped.
Would jumping straight to the playoffs be fair to New Orleans, which is 3½ games behind Memphis for the West's eighth seed but had a far easier schedule than the Grizzlies down the stretch? Would a play-in tournament be fair to Dallas or Houston or Oklahoma City or Utah or whichever West team slips to the seventh seed?
No. But in case you haven't noticed, the NBA doesn't do things for fair. Never has. Never will. The NBA makes decisions based on the bottom line.
The bottom line in this pandemic season appears to be not 16 and not 30, but the arbitrary number of 22.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. You can also view his personality page at oklahoman.com/berrytramel.