Details on NBA restart plan and what it means for the Heat. And Jimmy Butler back in Miami
There are still questions that need answers regarding the NBA’s return amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but the league’s restart plan is finally coming into focus after the season was suspended on March 11.
With the NBA’s Board of Governors on track for a vote Thursday, owners are expected to approve NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s recommendation on a format to restart the season near Orlando this summer. According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Silver will propose a 22-team format for the season’s resumption at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex that begins July 31 and includes regular-season and possible play-in games to compete for playoff berths in both the Eastern and Western Conference.
Each of the 22 teams will play eight regular-season games in Orlando for playoff seeding purposes, according to ESPN.
The Miami Heat owns the fourth-best record in the Eastern Conference at 41-24, and is 2.5 games behind the third-place Boston Celtics and two games ahead of the fifth-place Indiana Pacers and sixth-place Philadelphia 76ers. Playing eight regular-season games assures the Heat no lower than the East’s sixth seed with the No. 7 Brooklyn Nets 10.5 games behind the Heat and likely no higher than the East’s third seed with the No. 2 Toronto Raptors 5.5 games ahead of the Heat.
Understanding the Heat would be part of any potential resumption of the season, most of the roster spent the league shutdown in Miami. Fourteen of the Heat’s 17 players under contract (including the two two-way contract players) have remained in South Florida and have been available to participate in voluntary arena workouts over the past three weeks.
The only Heat players who quarantined in another part of the country were Jimmy Butler, Andre Iguodala and Solomon Hill, who each spent most of the league’s shutdown in California.
But according to league sources, Butler returned to South Florida this week after spending most of the NBA hiatus in his San Diego home, and Iguodala also recently returned to South Florida after quarantining in his San Francisco Bay Area home. Hill is the lone Heat player who has not returned to Miami yet, but he is expected to be in South Florida soon after spending most of the shutdown in Los Angeles.
Even after a restart format is agreed upon, there will still be plenty of uncharted territory to cover to complete the season. For one, how will teams operate in the NBA’s Orlando bubble environment?
Los Angeles Lakers forward Jared Dudley said to reporters on May 20 that players will be allowed to leave the bubble, but Dudley also added the Lakers will keep a close eye on the All-Star duo of Anthony Davis and LeBron James to protect them from contracting COVID-19 and missing weeks of games while self-quarantining.
“Bron, AD and all the top guys we have, we’ll be wrapping them in a bubble and not letting them go anywhere,” Dudley said to reporters last month. “You’ll have that be a team rule. Now, it won’t be a league, an NBA rule, but you’d want to say, ‘Listen, guys, we’ve come too far. We’re going to put our family on hold.’”
However, Heat captain Udonis Haslem doesn’t believe teams should treat All-Stars any differently than other players on the roster when it comes to life inside the NBA’s bubble.
“I’m sure that we’re going to try to keep everybody as safe as possible,” Haslem said to the Miami Herald. “It does no good to try to quarantine Bam [Adebayo] and Jimmy more than anybody else because at the end of the day, then they’re going to catch [COVID-19] from us. It does no good to treat them any more delicately than anybody else.
“I think everybody has to be treated just as delicately as possible individually and collectively. If you quarantine Bam and Jimmy more than you do anybody else and you try to give us a little more leeway and freedom to move around, we’re going to bring it back to them. Everybody has to be treated the same.”
But even with the NBA reportedly choosing to refer to its isolation plan to resume play as a “campus environment” and Dudley saying players won’t be restricted from exiting the premises, Haslem said he’s still worried about the mental toll it could have on players, coaches and others who spend weeks and potentially months in Central Florida to complete their seasons.
“As an athlete and a competitor, you put me in a competitive setting, I’m going to compete,” Haslem said. “That’s just who I am. But I just worry about going deeper into quarantine as the world starts going into post-pandemic and we start to see things open up a little bit and people starting to take baby steps to getting back to a somewhat normal life. And you’re asking us to go deeper into the quarantine? That’s what’s going to be tough. That’s going to be hard to figure out.”
The 22-team plan that’s expected to be approved by owners Thursday includes regular-season, play-in and playoff games, and it would feature the 16 teams currently in playoff spots and six more teams within six games of the eighth seed in each conference, according to ESPN. Those extra six teams are the Portland Trail Blazers, New Orleans Pelicans, Sacramento Kings, San Antonio Spurs and Phoenix Suns in the Western Conference, and the Washington Wizards in the Eastern Conference.
According to Shams Charania from The Athletic, the potential play-in tournament will come after the completion of the regular season and would be for the eighth seed and would work as follows: If the ninth seed is more than four games behind the eighth seed, the eighth seed earns the playoff spot; if the ninth seed is four or fewer games behind, then the eighth and ninth seed will enter a play-in tournament that is double-elimination for the eighth seed and single-elimination for the ninth seed.
ESPN reported the season will resume beginning on July 31 and will end as late as Oct. 12 if there’s a Game 7 in the NBA Finals, and the NBA Draft and free agency would likely follow in October. The Athletic reported the draft lottery and combine is expected to be in August.
“I’m the first to say let’s play,” Haslem said. “But I just hope it works out for everybody and we can find a common ground. But we’ve been quarantining just like everybody else, so you’re asking us to watch the world open up. We can put our TVs on, so we’re going to see the world start to kind of get back to normal and open. And you’re asking us to go deeper into quarantine for an extra three or four months. ... There’s a mental aspect with that.”
▪ The Heat had to cancel one day of voluntary individual workouts at AmericanAirlines Arena recently because of protests in downtown Miami, but players were back in the practice facility Wednesday, according to a league source.
This story was originally published June 3, 2020 at 10:48 AM.
