JWSport Jacek Waszak – Sport journalist
What a situation in American basketball and what a mess in the NBA. It is about the timing of resuming the best basketball in the world.
The new NBA season could start even on 22 December. However, the players do not want to start this year. Negotiations are ongoing.
The NBA wants to speed up and shorten the holiday for the players. What does that mean? According to the latest information of Adrian Wojnarowski from “ESPN”, there is a chance that the NBA will come back on 22 December this year. The 2020/21 season would be shortened to 72 matches. This would enable players to take part in the Tokyo Olympics, which are currently scheduled for July.
This plan and the interesting way out is not to the liking of players who, in this arrangement, would have a very short break from training. The head of the Athletes’ Union, Michele Roberts, admitted that the negotiations are not yet complete.
The NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is standing against the wall. On the one hand, he understands players who want to rest in a bubble after difficult months. On the other hand, the league’s television partners are pushing for a return to the traditional calendar for the 2021/22 season, which means that the next games should end in June.
Basketball players would prefer to start in mid-January, on Martin Luther King’s day, which falls in the United States on the third Monday of January.
