The NBA has found a date for the 11 games postponed to December due to COVID-19 and has shifted the times or dates for 10 other games to help adjust to those changes.
The Toronto Raptors have had six games affected by these changes. In all, 18 of the 30 NBA teams saw at least one date change applied to their timelines in the announcements revealed on Monday.
There are currently seven teams that will play at least a four-game streak in five days, including the Raptors, Chicago Bulls, Brooklyn Nets, Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat, Nova Scotia Pelicans. Orleans and the Denver Nuggets. There was no such streak in the original NBA schedule.
“The goal and the priority here was to avoid teams playing three games in three nights and look for an intermediate approach,” said NBA Vice President Evan Wasch, who helps oversee the schedule for the tournament. league.
The Nets, who were unable to play against the Portland Trail Blazers last month because they were missing a dozen players, have the most peculiar schedule for the next week.
The Brooklyn squad will face the San Antonio Spurs at home on Sunday, and will then head to Portland the following day to play this postponed game on January 10. She will then return east to face the Bulls on January 12.
To facilitate the trip to Portland, the NBA has advanced to Sunday noon the duel between the Nets and the Spurs. The two teams were scheduled to face off in the evening, but now the New York team will be in Portland on Sunday night.
There were other options for this Nets-Blazers duel, according to Wasch, but it was better for everyone involved that it took place on Jan.10.
“The main reason we’re announcing the changes now is that we wanted to make sure teams have at least a week’s notice of any postponements, from a travel, basketball-related planning, business or more ticket sales, Wasch said. It made sense to do it now. ”
Other changes also include the early return of former Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry to Toronto. It was scheduled for February 3, but it will now be held on February 1er February, when the Heat stop in Ontario for the first time this season. It is still unclear whether fans will be able to attend the game, as the Ontario government has limited the number of people allowed to attend a sporting event to 1,000.
The All-Star break will come a day later than scheduled for the Washington Nets and Wizards, as the NBA postponed one of their meeting to February 17. The two teams were due to play their last game before the break on February 16.
The NBA had just under 90 players known in COVID-19 health and safety protocols as of Monday afternoon, a significant drop from the middle of last week when the list peaked. to 125 players. There are also dozens of head coaches, assistant coaches and team staff in the protocols.
“We think we’ve had the worst of the postponements,” Wasch said. Hopefully we won’t have any more, but we don’t expect another such high number of postponements. We thought it made sense to put those 11 games back on the calendar. ”