Few would argue with the NBA’s decision to start its season this past week, except that is, for players and coaches exhausted from last season’s late finish.
Money rules, though. Or more precisely, TV money.
It was an $800 million dollar decision the players’ union had to consider, said Monte Morris, who is the Nuggets’ union representative. Start dates in January wouldn’t have satisfied lucrative television contracts and also would have missed marquee Christmas games.
The NBA also didn’t want to stretch its season any later than it needed to and have its finals land during the football season. Last October’s NBA Finals saw TV ratings fall 51% from 2019. Facing projected losses of up to 40% in revenue for the 2020-21 season due to the loss of gate receipts, according to ESPN, players weighed the financial realities with the physical and mental toll of resuming play so quickly, leading to the shortest NBA offseason in history.
“It was a no-brainer for us to start (early),” Morris said. “It was something that some guys weren’t wanting to do so quick, just with the standard of being off, just getting done with basketball. Sometimes, you want to sit back and have a break.”
Morris, who polled Nuggets players about returning and conveyed their feelings to the rest of the Players’ Association, estimated league-wide “probably 60, 70% (of players) said yes, so we had to go with it.”
The Nuggets began training camp Dec. 1, 65 days after leaving the “Bubble” in Orlando after losing in the Western Conference Finals, and amid yet another spike in COVID-19 cases across the country.
While news of the vaccine is encouraging, NBA commissioner Adam Silver made it clear the league as a whole will “wait our turn to get the vaccine,” he told reporters recently.
“It goes without saying that in no form or way will we jump the line,” Silver said.
The resumption of play has left Nuggets fans scrambling to see their team play. (No fans are currently allowed in Ball Arena). Stan Kroenke, who owns the Nuggets and Altitude TV, remains embroiled in a standoff with Comcast, the area’s largest cable television provider. That clash has kept games off the majority of local fans’ televisions. Altitude’s deal with DirecTV, agreed upon last October, doesn’t have near the customer reach a potential Comcast deal would. (AT&T TV Now, a streaming service that provides DirecTV programming, is an option.)
“The thing that’s most frustrating … it’s been about 10, 11 years, we have a good, young team, we’re competing and then (before) the pandemic, I went to the Nuggets-Lakers game that was a birthday present to me from my wife and two daughters, and that was great, but then that was it,” said decades-long Nuggets fan Mario Jannatpour, who this season added the AT&T TV Now streaming service. “… The Comcast thing has just been a nightmare for us.”
In some ways, attempting to hold the regular season outside of a bubble presents more obstacles than the NBA faced in finishing last season. Take the Nuggets-Warriors’ preseason opener, for example. The Warriors planned a walk-through for 10 a.m., but found out that morning that their COVID-19 test results from the prior day had been delayed. They pushed the walk-through to 3 p.m.
“We’re realizing quickly that we’re going to have to be ready to call audibles every day knowing the lengths to which the league is going to keep everybody safe, how many precautions we have and how much protocol there is,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “We’ve just gotta be flexible.”
Nuggets coach Michael Malone has voiced mild criticism on multiple occasions about the rush to start the season.
“I feel like we’re just in a hurry to start this season,” Malone said before the season started. “They’re coming out with different memos and protocols every day. Things are happening on the fly.”
One recent procedure left Malone waiting in his car for 90 minutes outside Ball Arena after the first rapid test he took came back invalid.
And one day into the new season, the Oklahoma City-Houston game was postponed due to the Rockets not having enough players to suit up due to coronavirus issues.
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The league hasn’t yet decided whether to mandate its players get vaccines, if and when they become widely available.
Nothing about this season will feel normal. Perhaps that’s why Malone wouldn’t pin himself into a corner when asked what it would take to deem this season a success.
“Most people will judge us improving whether or not we get to the NBA Finals,” he said, before adding, “This will not be a championship or bust year, I can tell you that.”
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