• last year
How Would a Summer of Basketball Impact Players?
Transcript
00:00With the NBA season on hold until further notice,
00:03the league is reportedly looking at resuming its season
00:06possibly in mid-June,
00:07and then running the playoffs and finals into August.
00:11Sports Illustrated's Chris Mannix joins us now.
00:13And Chris, an NBA season, playoffs in the summer
00:17are starting to look like a strong possibility.
00:19Let's talk about the impact first on the players here.
00:22How would this type of move in scheduling
00:24affect them the most?
00:26Well, I think the biggest impact comes
00:29with just what kind of condition these guys are in
00:32and, I mean, really what their injury issues are like
00:36when they come back.
00:37I mean, this is absolutely uncharted territory
00:40for a lot of these guys.
00:41And if there are teams you look at,
00:43like the Philadelphia 76ers,
00:45who have one of their stars, Ben Simmons,
00:47dealing with a significant back injury,
00:49do they benefit from a long layoff
00:51that resumes with the playoffs?
00:53You have other teams that are playing extremely well
00:55going into this break,
00:57like the Lakers coming up.
00:58They're two of their biggest wins of the season.
01:01How do they respond after a long layoff?
01:03There are just a lot of unknowns
01:05about how players' bodies and games are gonna respond
01:08if the NBA comes back after more than two months.
01:12Chris, August is traditionally a dead time of year
01:15for sports on television.
01:17What would the NBA finals in August
01:19do to television ratings?
01:21Well, it's a great question,
01:23and one that I think there are a lot of owners out there
01:25that are eager to know the answer.
01:27As most people that follow basketball know,
01:30Steve Coonan, top executive with the Atlanta Hawks,
01:33he has pitched the idea of starting the NBA
01:37at Christmastime and running the NBA season through August.
01:40Now, one of the big pushbacks to that
01:43has been that ratings tend to go down in August,
01:46and television networks don't wanna see
01:48their biggest, most high-profile games
01:51shown in front of shrinking audiences.
01:53If the NBA's forced to play games,
01:56play significant games, into July and August,
01:59this will provide an invaluable set of data
02:03that league officials can study
02:05and make a determination of maybe
02:07this is the kind of schedule they wanna use going forward.
02:10With the new CDC recommendations of eight weeks now
02:14for gatherings of more than 50 people,
02:17we don't know how long that's gonna get pushed back,
02:20Chris, obviously, but when it comes to going further
02:22and further into this summer,
02:24we've talked a little bit about June
02:25and possibly a Finals in August.
02:27Is there a drop-dead date where the NBA
02:29just simply could not complete the season?
02:33Well, in talking to league officials,
02:34they haven't discussed that at this point.
02:37They are quite literally taking this one month at a time.
02:40Obviously, the new CDC guidelines establish a new timeline,
02:44that being the middle of May, effectively,
02:48before NBA basketball could even conceive of coming back.
02:51But they acknowledge that is going to be something
02:54that will be discussed.
02:55But there are a lot of things on the table right now, Ryan.
02:58There's the subject of paying players.
03:01I mean, at some point, NBA owners are gonna say,
03:03we're losing all this money.
03:05We can't keep paying players their full salary
03:08all throughout the summer.
03:09So there are a lot of things going on
03:11in the league office right now,
03:12and I mean, they're just trying to take it
03:13one day at a time.
03:15Yeah, as we all really can at this point.
03:17So much speculation, so much still unknown
03:20when it comes to the world of sports
03:21and the effects, of course, of the coronavirus.
03:24Sports Illustrated's Chris Mannix.
03:25Thanks, Chris.
03:26You got it.