LeBron James has changed his stance on how the NBA will resume the season several times, as many around the NBA and the sports world has, as they wait to see if there is any way to salvage the 2019-20 season and still crown a 2020 champion. LeBron has said before that he didn’t have interest in playing somewhere while quarantined away from his family but then last week suggested that it would be hard for him to have “closure” if there was no way to crown a champion and potentially finish the season.
If they do, however, the NBA doesn’t want to repeat mistakes from work stoppages past. Even though the circumstances of the hiatus due to coronavirus are drastically different from the 2011 lockout, lessons do remain about how to safely get players who have been coupled up at home back to work. According to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, one of those lessons involves a proposed 25-day plan to help players get back in shape for a potential end of the season run.
Under the plan, players would go through an 11-day stretch of individual workouts in which they could maintain some measure of social distancing while ramping up training and activity. Then, if permitted by medical officials, the idea would be to allow for a two-week training camp with entire teams participating.
Windhorst’ reporting also suggests that several teams would prefer to have a month or more of training. Typically, players for NBA teams will come back in the month leading up to the regular season to play pick-up games and get to know their teammates prior to training camp, unless they are taking care of national team responsibilities. With that in mind, it’s more than reasonable to expect that these amazing athletes will need a longer runway to get into the shape they need to be in order to avoid injury.
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