NBA commissioner Adam Silver held a conference call with NBA general managers on Thursday to review the results of the survey delivered to teams last week regarding potential formats to resume play. “There was zero commitment to any one plan,” a general manager told me over the phone. “But it was a call to gather more information.”
Half of the league’s general managers voted to go straight to the playoffs and cancel the rest of the regular season, sources said. Just over half of the league voted to reseed the playoffs 1 to 16 without factoring in conference affiliation.
General managers were surveyed about a “playoffs-plus” format—either a play-in tournament between the bubble teams to determine the final seeds in the playoffs, or a World Cup–style group stage, which would replace the end of the regular season and the first round of the playoffs with a round-robin format. About 75 percent of teams voted in favor of a play-in tournament, sources said, while 25 percent of teams voted in favor of the group stage.
Teams with top seeds, such as the West-leading Lakers and East-leading Bucks, are in favor of a play-in tournament, not a group stage, multiple league sources say. That’s unsurprising considering a play-in tournament with the current standings would mean the Bucks get to face the Magic, and the Lakers would face the Grizzlies (or whichever team stole the eighth seed in a play-in tournament scenario). A group stage would make for a more difficult path to the title. “Adam isn’t taking the results seriously,” a team executive told me earlier in the week. “Every team is obviously gonna vote for what’s best for them.”
Even if teams vote in their own best interests, it’s still noteworthy that there is leaguewide support behind dramatic changes that were balked at in the past—such as playoff reseeding and play-in tournaments. My impression from conversations with sources across the league is that Silver is surveying teams to see whether there is hunger for a new format the league may be able to use beyond this summer’s restart. Perhaps that’s a play-in tournament, which the league formally proposed last year before plans stalled. Perhaps it’s the group stage, which could take the teams with the 20 best records and place them into pool play. Either way, the league is trying to use the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to innovate.
But teams still have questions. Team representatives asked Silver how the NBA draft lottery would be handled if a playoffs-plus scenario were used. What if, for example, the Spurs took the eighth seed from the Grizzlies—do the Spurs lose their lottery pick? Or what if a team like the Jazz, currently no. 4 in the West, lost in a group stage and a current lottery team like the Blazers advanced? At present, there is no clear answer.
One executive I spoke with earlier in the week offered his own suggestion: If the NBA allows only 20 teams to compete for the rest of the reason, it should simply lock the current order of those teams at picks 11-30 (aside from the current tiebreakers that must be decided by coin flip). Then, the lottery odds could be recalculated to include just 10 teams rather than the usual 14. That seems like a logical and fair solution to me considering the odds are so low that a team slotted 11th through 14th would move up in the lottery anyway.
General managers unanimously favored expanding rosters in the postseason, sources said. However, there is no set date for when games will be played again. No definitive schedule was discussed on Thursday’s call with general managers. But rumblings across the league suggest the NBA will require teams to arrive at Disney World around July 16, at which point they’ll quarantine for a to-be-determined amount of time before group workouts resume and scrimmages begin. And then, games could begin on Friday, July 31. But all of that will be determined in the coming days and weeks, and anything as of now is simply tentative or speculation.
Group workouts are still disallowed. The NBA is still restricting teams with open practice facilities to allow only voluntary workouts by individual players. Multiple general managers and executives say that the league’s preference is for no group workouts to occur until teams arrive at Disney World, where the league believes its own testing and safety procedures can better control and minimize the odds of a coronavirus outbreak. In other words, the league prefers no training camps occur until teams get to Disney World.
Teams have also pushed back on no group workouts before arriving to the campus, citing that their players need more time to physically ramp up for competitive games, or else quality of play will decrease and the risk of injury will dramatically increase. At this moment, the league is prioritizing COVID-19 health, not physical health, but league executives fully anticipate that group workouts will be allowed at some point before they arrive at Disney World. “I expect the league to revise that plan once a schedule is actually set,” a general manager told me. “Silver isn’t stupid.”
The number of teams that actually travel to Disney World remains up in the air. Every source I have spoken with this week believes that the league’s preference is for some teams to stay home—likely, the teams with the 10 worst records—because adding hundreds more players, coaches, and personnel would raise the risk of potential infections. Even though teams have regional sports TV network contracts to fulfill, any potential gain might not outweigh the potential losses.
On Friday, Silver will talk with the board of governors. They’ll discuss formats to resume the season, a potential timeline for a return, and the mechanics of which teams should and shouldn’t be involved. But nothing will be determined. Ultimately, the most important conversation Silver will have is with National Basketball Players Association executive director Michele Roberts. The league and its players association will need to come to an agreement to restart the season, and Roberts has been pushing for a plan to be resolved soon because the players are antsy to return to action. Said one general manager of a playoff team, “Pick a plan, and we’ll do it. Let’s play.”