Report: NBA mulls shortening early playoff series to best-of-five

With the NBA unlikely to resume its 2019-20 season before June, options to compress the revised schedule include shorter playoff series.

Among many scenarios being considered by the NBA in the wake of its coronavirus-induced shutdown is shortening early playoff series to best-of-five, rather than best-of-seven, per ESPN‘s Adrian Wojnarowski.

The league office and its owners held a conference call late Tuesday with Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General.

According to Wojnarowski, Murthy expressed some optimism regarding the crisis based on recent social-distancing measures taken across the United States. In turn, that left owners with the impression that the 2019-20 NBA season could be resumed before July.

Wojnarowski writes:

Murthy told the board of governors that he was more optimistic in recent days, once state officials took the lead in trying to mitigate the transmission of the virus, sources said. Murthy’s words were consistent with those of other credible health officials, warning those on the call that the worst is yet to come.

“Basically, [Dr. Murthy] said: The only good news is that people are starting to stay home,” one high-ranking league official told ESPN. “No one left that call thinking we could be playing anytime soon.”

The NBA has been considering numerous contingency plans, which include playing only several more regular-season games and shortening early playoff series from best-of-seven to best-of-five, but everything remains fluid, sources said.

It is not yet clear whether fans would be allowed back in arenas, if the season were to resume in the summer.

At the moment, the Rockets (40-24) are tied for the No. 5 spot in the Western Conference standings with the Oklahoma City Thunder. But they would lose that two-team tiebreaker for playoff seeding, since the Thunder beat Houston in two of their three meetings this season.

Houston is only one game behind No. 4 Utah (41-23), whom the Rockets do have the tiebreaker against, and only two back in the loss column of No. 3 Denver (43-22). The potential tiebreaker situation between the Rockets and Nuggets is complicated, since the teams split their four meetings, and would likely depend on whether Denver wins its division.

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If the 2020 NBA playoffs were to begin today, the Rockets would enter as the No. 6 seed and without home-court advantage, starting with what could be a best-of-five series in the first round against No. 3 Denver.

The Rockets were supposed to have 18 games left in the regular season, which would normally leave plenty of time to make up the relatively small gap in the standings and move into a position for a top-four seed and home-court advantage in at least the first round of the playoffs.

But given what seems to be at least a three-month stoppage due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, it appears unlikely that the NBA will play all 82 of its originally scheduled games.

Going by the original schedule, the league had roughly three months to go between the remaining regular-season dates at the time of the March 11 suspension and when the NBA Finals conclude in mid-June.

Unless the season resumes by the end of May, which seems unlikely based on current projections, then reducing the amount of games (in the regular season, playoffs, or both) would appear to be necessary for the league to crown its champion before football begins in September.

Thus, while the Rockets will likely have at least some opportunity to make up ground in the standings before the playoffs, it probably won’t be as much as they had planned. The league is aiming to wrap up the 2019-20 campaign by the end of August at the latest, in order to have at least some semblance of an offseason before the 2020-21 league year begins.

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