While Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and several other important players on the Brooklyn Nets’ roster are plenty well-rested and prepared for the 2020-21 NBA season to start whenever, the same cannot necessarily be said for the rest of the league.
Typically, the NBA Finals conclude in mid-June and the next season will kick off at the very end of October with training camp starting roughly one month prior. That gives the NBA champion and runner-up almost four months to recover before training camp.
The last game of the 2020 NBA Finals was on October 11. If the league wants to give the players the same amount of rest, next season doesn’t start until the calendar flips from 2020 to 2021.
Yet, the NBA commissioner Adam Silver continues to push for the league to start back up before Christmas, according to Adrian Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe of ESPN.
On a conference call with the league’s general managers on Monday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver told the top team basketball executives that ‘time is running out’ on the possibility of starting the 2020-21 season prior to Christmas Day and potentially salvaging hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Under Silver’s proposed idea, 2020-21 would be a 72-game season with training camp starting on December 1. The league is now “fearful it has only several days left before” that idea “is no longer a realistic possibility.”
Despite the NBPA’s continued pushback on the matter, “optimism still exists that an agreement can be reached on the pre-Christmas start.”