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Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE via Getty Images
On Wednesday, just two weeks before the second half of the NBA season is over, the league announced the schedule for the final nine weeks of the 2020-21 campaign. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the inevitability of missed matches, the league originally created the schedule in two parts, thus giving the opportunity to adapt quickly.
In the first half, several teams wiped out quite a few weeks due to positive coronavirus tests or contact detection problems. Some matches earmarked for the second half have already been made up on the days in the first half.
The schedule for the second half is even more compressed than the first half, and some teams have to suffer an uneven amount of matches due to postponement in the first half. In other words, some teams will find it harder than others.
Here are the winners and losers of the league’s announcement on Wednesday.
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Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press
Anthony Davis is not expected to return before the All-Star break, and there is no guarantee he will have a full chance when he returns. Achilles-related injuries are nothing to play with, and the Lakers clearly care more about making sure he is healthy for the playoffs than getting the No. 1 team in the West Conference.
Fortunately, their schedule starts off pretty soft after the break. Four of their first five games are at home, and their only game in the series is in San Francisco against the Golden State Warriors (who come after two days off).
Their first two games, against the Indiana Pacers and the Warriors, are their only games against top 500 teams in the first week. Their next three come against the Minnesota Timberwolves, Charlotte Hornets and Atlanta Hawks, all the teams they could have beaten without Davis.
After that, the Lakers go on a two-game trip before ending up with four more games at home in March, including against the Eastern Conference lottery teams in the Orlando Magic and Cleveland Cavaliers.
Even if Davis takes a little longer than expected to return, the Lakers would be able to just keep up the pace and prepare themselves to enter the playoffs at full strength.
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Brandon Dill / Associated Press
Nearly every team had matches influenced by the league’s health and safety protocols, but a handful were hit particularly hard and paid the price at the back.
The Memphis Grizzlies’ schedule for the second half includes 40 games, a seven-game drive and a whopping 11 backs.
The San Antonio Spurs also have 40 games to compensate in the 68-day period leading up to the playoffs, including seven full-backs.
The Washington Wizards, who had the league’s first sensational finish, have 38 games and seven rugby games.
The NBA is not going to allow a scenario like last year’s truncated regular season, where even after the eight “seed games” in the bubble, not every team played the same games. This year, everyone has to get to 72 somehow, even if it means some teams have to play cruel schedules for the second half.
And that before you consider postponement in the second half. Hopefully, as the explosion of vaccines increases across the country, it will become less difficult through the playoffs. The first half of the season showed us that nothing can be guaranteed, but these teams are already playing from behind due to the hits that have already reached their schedules.
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Phelan M. Ebenhack / Associated Press
The Golden State Warriors are currently 17-15, ranking them eighth in the Western Conference. They have a one-game lead over ninth-place Dallas Mavericks, but only a three-game lead over 11th-place New Orleans Pelicans.
With the new play-off format of the NBA for the last two times in each conference, the play-offs of the rand have a small margin of error, and a bad week can lead to a team from the home field advantage in the play to the outside look at draft prospects.
Luckily for the Warriors, the schedule producers were kind to them. Their last six games are at home, and the opponents are favorable.
They start with two live games against the Oklahoma City Thunder, which should be in full tank by that time. Next is the Utah Jazz, who will likely be locked up in the No. 1 seed then and may not play all of them; one tough game against the Phoenix Suns, who also have to struggle for the position in the playoffs; and they conclude with games against the New Orleans Pelicans and Memphis Grizzlies, the latter of whom will finish off a very difficult and compressed schedule to compensate for all their postponement.
Assuming they stay healthy, the Warriors will have plenty of opportunities to put themselves in a good position on the way to play-in – and immediately become the low-ranked ones that none of the higher-ranked teams want to face in the first round not.
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Phelan M. Ebenhack / Associated Press
The New York Knicks want to play the playoffs for the first time in eight seasons. With another week before the All-Star break, they are right on the edge of the post-season picture.
The Knicks are currently in a triple draw with the Chicago Bulls and Charlotte Hornets for seventh place in the East. They are only sixth behind the Boston Celtics, which allows them to avoid the playoffs, but they are only half a game ahead of the Miami Heat in tenth place.
If there is a serious injury, this race could come down to the last week of the season, and the Knicks’ schedule to close it out is cruel. They begin May with a six-game tour that begins with a rugby game in Houston and Memphis and ends with games against four playoff teams in the Nuggets, Suns, Clippers and Lakers.
They return home for their last two games of the season, which are against the Hornets and Celtics – two of the teams they are currently in a solid race with.
The Knicks’ fate will be decided in the two weeks, and their path to the playoffs will not be easy. There can be razor-sharp margins between avoiding the playoffs and missing out on the playoffs.
The Knicks have been one of the surprising success stories of the season so far, but they have a tough road ahead of them to retain the win and return to the playoffs.
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Michael Dwyer / Associated Press
It is not surprising that the two teams with the most national television games in the second half of the season are the Lakers with 21 and the Nets with 20, according to ESPN Statistics and Information.
The schedule makers should have built in a slightly longer recovery time for Davis (see above) because the Lakers have only one ESPN game in the first two weeks and no TNT game until March 23rd. Then Davis will hopefully be back again.
Brooklyn meanwhile begins the second half with a home game against the Celtics on TNT and plays the Knicks four days later on ESPN.
The Nets season was in full swing and started since they traded for James Harden. Kevin Durant has missed all 14 games due to various health and safety protocol and minor injuries. But they were very excited to watch when Durant, Harden and Kyrie Irving are all healthy, and fans will have plenty of opportunities to see them on national TV in the second half of the season.
Elsewhere on the national TV schedule, there are three Bucks-Sixers matches that will be crucial in the race for the best seed in the East, and stars like Damian Lillard, Zion Williamson and Luka Doncic will get a lot of exposure. Even the Charlotte Hornets, who are often forgotten but are now a star in LaMelo Ball, will be on TNT against Brooklyn on April 1st.
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Mike Stobe / Associated Press
The compressed schedule for the second half is heavy on rugby files and road trips, giving players almost no time to recover. Injuries are probably inevitable, which is unfortunate.
The only way playoff teams can avoid this is to put their star players in some of the stricter pieces of the schedule to make sure they are healthy for the playoffs.
This is an inevitable truth of the schedule, just like in the exclusion season 2011-’12, which also plugged in many games in a short period of time and had an increase in injuries. In the nine seasons since then, teams have become much more forward-thinking when it comes to player rest, and it will come as no surprise if teams rest their best players more than usual.
As much as it makes sense from a health point of view, it’s very difficult for fans. It’s already been a strange and contradictory season to follow, given the reality of the pandemic, inconsistent policies in different cities to allow fans into arenas and uncertainty about when things will return to normal.
Add the probability higher than usual that a match with an exhibition, for example, Stephen Curry or Giannis Antetokounmpo will not be, and there will be many disappointments in the second half of the season.