Sixers locked out from NBA practice-site re-openings
Among the best things about the NBA in the last three decades was its dedication to balance.
Salaries would be capped.
Teams would draft players in reverse order of the season standings.
There would be strong commissioners. No team would play in a decrepit arena.
All franchises would have practice facilities, some of them palatial. Scheduling would be fair. The playoffs would make sense.
It’s not the only reason why New York has not won a championship since 1973 and that San Antonio has won five since 1999. But the NBA assures that small-market, largemarket and second-team-ina-market teams all can enjoy the same reasonable paths to fulfillment.
In the modern NBA, there have been no favorites.
Then came Friday. And that’s when some teams were allowed to open their training facilities on a limited basis while others would be made to keep their players at home. Not a sinister plan, and a necessary step toward the return of actual games, the setup nonetheless was not ideal to organizations in states with the more stringent stay-athome rules.
The Sixers, with three-state citizenship, were among those told to stand down until coronavirus concerns would decrease to the point where the governor of Pennsylvania, New Jersey or Delaware would give the OK to lift the quarantine signs from their facilities.
That’s a disadvantage, one that the ever-evolving Sixers do not need. And isn’t edge, no matter how slight, still an edge?
“Good question,” Sixers general manager Elton Brand said the other day, on a conference call. “There are some states that have loosened the stay-at-home mandate. And on
the calls with the GMs, it was basically, ‘We’d rather have our players in our facilities instead of going out to other gyms, because we know we’d have a better chance of keeping our players safe.’”
As of Friday, reports were that the Cavaliers, Trail Blazers and Nuggets were planning to open their facilities to limited numbers of players. The Magic is reported to be set for a Tuesday opening. Though safety will be a priority everywhere, other organizations declined the option to reopen, including the Mavericks, with owner Mark Cuban citing a too-high risk-reward ratio.
But the Sixers were among the many teams that didn’t have that choice, not at their practice facility in New Jersey, not at the Wells Fargo Center, and not even at their classy G-League outpost in Delaware. Though it’s not the NBA that is prohibiting the Sixers from returning to practice, even on a limited basis, the league did agree it was best for teams with the opportunity to do so to de-mothball their practice sites.
“They sent out memos, probably 13 or 14 pages, on how to keep everything clean,” Brand said. “And to be clear, it would be voluntary. There’s no bench coaches or anything like that. It’s just basically letting the players get out there individually, in groups of no more than four, having a gym for them to shoot, work out a little bit, get a sweat.”
If the idea is just giving players a place to shoot, the continued shutdown technically won’t affect Ben Simmons. But if any championship-minded team needs time together, it is the one that has hurled its roster into upheaval for nearly 18 months in a raging panic to rationalize years of a strange willingness to lose.
With Brett Brown leading the choir since training camp, the Sixers have been sharing their belief that they can win the Eastern Conference. Their 29-2 home record has screamed the same thing. Yet Glenn Robinson III was able to play just 12 games since his Feb. 6 trade-deadline acquisition from Golden State. Alec Burks had played 11. Joel Embiid has missed 14 games since January with injuries. Simmons was still dealing with a back injury when NBA play was halted March 11. And Brown, for many reasons, used 19 different starting lineups in 55 games, approximately 18 of which made Al Horford appear comfortable.
While all teams will need freshening when the NBA returns, not all have realistic championship aspirations, not all have an All-Star recovering from an injury, not all have another All-Star with a welldocumented inability to remain in top shape after any layoff, and not all have roster remade both in the offseason and at the deadline.
The Sixers are wellcoached and have enough veteran players to handle any situation. But the return to championship readiness will be a challenge, no matter how long the ramp-up.
“I wish everyone could open up at the same time, but that’s just not the reality with the health issues around the country,” Brand said. “I’m monitoring our situation in New Jersey and we’ll make a determination when it is possible to get in there and just take some shots and get a sweat.
“We’re monitoring it all and how these other teams react over the next week or so.”
On one level, the Sixers could benefit from staggered NBA re-openings because they have dedicated facilities in three convenient states. Though Brand made it sound unlikely that the Sixers would go to the extreme of relocating their players to distant sites with relaxed restrictions, the Sixers could back-cut to Pennsylvania, New Jersey or Delaware with minimal stress.
“I will definitely make sure,” Brand said, “that we are not at a disadvantage when we come back.”
At least three open gyms Friday had begun, though, to suggest otherwise.