Magic seeding schedule revealed
NBA coming to Disney World despite COVID-19 surge.
The Orlando Magic’s seeding schedule was revealed Friday night after NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced the league will resume play at Disney World in Orlando despite a surge in Florida COVID-19 cases.
The Magic schedule is as follows, with all games played at Disney but the NBA still designating road and home teams for each matchup:
■ July 31: at Brooklyn, 2:30 p.m., TV to be announced
■ Aug. 2: Sacramento, 6 p.m., NBA TV
■ Aug. 4: at Indiana, 6 p.m., TV to be announced
■ Aug. 5: Toronto, 8 p.m., TV to be announced
■ Aug. 7: at Philadelphia, 6:30 p.m., TNT
■ Aug. 9: at Boston, 5 p.m., TV to be announced
■ Aug. 11: Brooklyn, 1 p.m., TV to be announced ■ Aug. 13: New Orleans, Time and TV to be announced
Games airing on Fox Sports Florida will be announced at a later date.
The NBA restart following the league’s coronavirus shutdown will begin with each participating team playing eight “seeding games,” as selected from the regular-season schedule the teams had remaining before the play was suspended.
At the conclusion of the seeding games, the seven teams in each conference with the highest combined winning percentages across regular season games and seeding games will be the first through seventh seeds for the NBA Playoffs for that conference.
If the team with the eighth-best combined winning percentage among regular season and seeding games in a conference is more than four games ahead of the team with the ninth-best combined winning percentage in the same conference, then it would take No. 8 playoff seed.
If the eighth-place team’s lead is fewer than four games, then the No. 8 and No. 9 ranked teams would compete in a play-in tournament to determine the eighth playoff seed. The play-in tournament will be double elimination for Team 8 and single elimination for Team 9.
The NBA’s standard playoff tiebreaker procedures will be used to break any ties on the basis of winning percentage. Once the 16-team playoff field is set, the NBA playoffs will proceed in a traditional conferencebased format with four rounds and best-ofseven series in each round.
Potential play-in games will be held Aug. 15-16, playoffs begin on Aug. 17, conference semifinals begin on Aug. 31, conference finals begin on Sept. 15 and the finals begin on Sept. 30.
The highly anticipated schedule announcement came after extensive negotiations with NBA leadership, team officials and players working with medical experts to determine how to play safely amid the