At midnight on Tuesday the NBA officially announced its plan for the 2020-21 season, ending much speculation and confusion about a number of topics, including off-season business that still needs to be taken care of and how long the season will be.
Here’s a quick rundown of what was announced and what questions still need to be answered.
When does the 2020-21 season start?
The season will start on Tuesday, Dec. 22 and each team will play 72 regular-season games.
This date will allow the league to keep its annual Christmas Day tradition — a marquee date on the NBA calendar — and reportedly generate an additional $500 million in revenue.
Though the Orlando bubble was a success, the NBA undeniably suffered big financial losses because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and as such any way to try to recoup some of those losses were always going to be a priority. For that reason, being able to start the next season as early as possible always made the most sense.
The league has yet to announce a schedule for the season but monitoring how the schedule is structured will be of interest as there will be no bubble this go-around and teams will be travelling again. As such, in the interest of safety schedules may be more regionally focused and there may not be a scenario where each team ends up facing each team at least once in the regular season.
It’s also unclear what the post-season format might look like but there’s been speculation that a play-in event similar to the one we saw in Disney World with the eight and nine seeds will be brought back, followed by a normal four-round playoff to crown a champion.
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What are some other key dates to look for?
Now that we officially have a date for the start of the season, we also have dates for other important pieces of off-season business. They are as follows:
• Wednesday, Nov. 18: NBA Draft
• Friday, Nov. 20: Free agency opens, starting at 6:00 p.m. ET.
• Sunday Nov. 22: Free agents can officially sign contracts, starting at 12:01 p.m. ET.
Of those three dates listed above only the date of the NBA Draft was known before the league’s midnight announcement Tuesday.
There’s another date of note not listed there that hasn’t been confirmed yet, however. It’s been reported that the NBA is targeting Dec. 1 to be the start of training camps, a logical choice as it’ll allow for the standard three-week camp and exhibition-game lead-up to a normal regular season.
The disadvantage to this, however, is the truncated nature of the NBA’s off-season and for teams to get all their business done. Should training camps start on Dec. 1 then that’ll give teams just 10 days to try to add anyone in free agency before players report to camp.
A stressful situation, for sure, if you work in an NBA front office, but for the rest of us this could mean a very fun, fast and furious flurry of activity during that time which will have all of us refreshing our Twitter timelines non-stop all day.
How does free agency work?
Just by looking at the dates above you can get a good sense at how free agency might work this year pretty well, but, essentially, free agency won’t be any different than any of the last few years since the moratorium period was introduced other than it being a lot shorter.
In normal circumstances, NBA free agency would’ve opened on June 30 wherein there would’ve been a week-long moratorium period for agents, players and teams to legally speak and meet with each other to negotiate. After that week is up the moratorium would be lifted and those contracts could be officially signed.
This year will work the same way with the exception being instead of the moratorium period before any ink could be put to paper lasting a week it’ll only be for a weekend.
Of course, given the uncertainty of this year’s free agency until Tuesday it shouldn’t come as any surprise that, according to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, agents have already been speaking to teams and have already negotiated contracts.
This obviously goes against the NBA’s anti-tampering rules, which is why the moratorium period was setup in the first place, and though these are extenuating circumstances this year it’ll be interesting to see what sort of disciplinary action the league hands out if this report turns out to be true — if any disciplinary action is taken, that is.
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What’s the salary cap for the 2020-21 season?
The last bit of news that was announced was the all-important salary cap and luxury tax figures and, as was reported before, those numbers are staying flat, remaining at a $109.14 million salary cap and a $132.627 million tax level.
Again, COVID was bad for the NBA’s business and so raising the cap for the 2020-21 season always looked like it was going to be out of the question, so the league, instead, opted to just keep it flat.
This makes sound financial sense for the league, but by not raising the tax level it may also be bad for many teams’ off-season plans.
This is because teams were likely planning for a higher tax line this off-season than in years past. The initial salary cap projection for the 2020-21 season was to be at about $115 million with a tax level of $139 million. It’s possible now that some teams were budgeting themselves to be just below $139 million will now have to pay the tax because the level stayed down at the $132.6-million range.
Another unfortunate casualty of the tax line staying flat is the possibility of less player movement now as making free-agent offers or even making a trade is more difficult if you’re a tax-paying team. This means, essentially, only teams with cap space will be able to make moves in the off-season, a list mostly comprised of clubs that didn’t make the playoffs last season and aren’t exactly what you’d call free agent destinations such as the Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Hornets, Detroit Pistons and New York Knicks.
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