I think they start around June 1st without fans and will cut the regular season to 72 games which will give most teams about 7 or 8 games to finish out (so like 3 weeks to get playoff ready). They will then do a full post-season, again without fans, but will ensure that no team has more than a day off between games (unless they finish a series early). Since there will not be fans, they can do earlier start times and basically make the first round have 4 games a day (say a 4, 630, 8, 10 start time or a 4, 7, 9, 11 or things like that). That would make the post season go through like mid-August. You then have a couple of weeks for end of year and draft prep with the draft at the end of August, a month and a half of free agency through like mid-October while doing "summer league". Then start ramping up for the season looking at like a December 1st start date with another 72 game season, which would end around the same time as normal. Then you are back to normal the following year.
I think a more permanent move of the season will be discussed (like always starting around December 1st or even January 1 and running through the summer), but ultimately they will go back to around what they always do.
I would really really love for you to be right, but any form of basketball starting up on June 1st is not in line with what I am seeing and hearing working in the medical field unfortunately.
Can you elaborate on what you're hearing and seeing that would hinder this?
To me, playing without fans even early than June 1 seems reasonable, if only because pro wrestling (WWE and AEW) seems to be successfully doing the empty arena thing.
I think both players and owners are going to want to get the product out their to get some money as opposed to no money.
On a side note, never thought of how "no fans" opens up new possibilities. 4 weekday games sounds awesome when you're stuck home with a quarantine. Pre-2000 that used to be the regular for the 1st round and it was great. TBS would have games at 7 and 9:30, and TNT would have 8 and 10:30.
Also theoretically, with no fans, home court advantage kind of goes out the window (though I'm sure sleeping in your own bed has some advantages). If you really want to go the extreme, they could play a whole series or even every series in one or two neutral locations to cut out travel and help everybody stay somewhat quarantined while they play.
Have all the East teams travel to and stay in one spot for the 1st 3 rounds, all the West teams do the same in a different spot. That way players, media, officials, etc. aren't constantly traveling to and fro, limiting their exposure. Being quarantined on the road, probably not too enjoyable for the players, but once those checks stop coming, they'll probably agree to anything to get that money coming back in.
Here are some things that are going to make it pretty hard to justify playing basketball games 2 months from now (also we have to allow them to practice for a few weeks before they start for safety, given that they can't even practice together right now. So if we really want to say June first contact drills probably have to start May 15)
We are still learning about the disease, and how many different strands there are of it. We are seeing far more young people infected in our country than the rest of the world. There are things like 12 year olds on ventilators and people in their 30's and 40's getting very ill that was not observed in other places.
Many clinics have been shut down for anything "elective" or just shut period. We have 31 clinics that are not ER in the state of Colorado. From what I understand, 21 of those clinics are now closed as they are focused on converting beds and care providers to be able to treat the severe covid patients. However, these elective procedures can be very serious, like a tumor removal. It can be determined that the tumor removal can be delayed 3 weeks without killing you, but what happens at 6 weeks or two months? I don't think this is going to be resolved two months from now and there is going to be a major backlog on our healthcare system. Is it going to go over the public to have a full medical team on hand and potentially driving a player in an ambulance to a hospital for a torn ACL when many people are desperately trying to access care and can not?
Can you get the virus more than once? Even Fauci has not been able to see whether this is the case or not. Though most of the players that we know of had pretty minor symptoms, you have to imagine some of them would not feel super comfortable sweating up on another player if they just had it and don't know this info
How accurate is the testing? Is there a period when you can get a false negative? At this time there isn't a slam dunk full confidence answer on all the different kinds of tests that are being used with new ones being developed every day. This is probably a smaller concern than some of these other things I have mentioned, but our death toll is going to continue to rise over the next month dramatically. I think this is going to only make people more scared.
How does the testing exactly work? I don't envision a system in place where we have enough tests for the entire population 6 weeks from now. Is it ethical to be giving 320 players, staff and coach repeated tests after they are staying in hotels and traveling and playing games? How do you prevent the players from having contact with anyone or any surface? These are pretty serious questions and it would make the NBA look really really awful if they start up too soon and an arena worker, coach or player died or had to go on a ventilator.
Also for what it is worth our curve is currently worse than what we observed in italy. It is going to continue getting worse and we recorded our highest death total today. I don't think Silver can really even raise the possibility (without sounding horrible) of starting the NBA season again until people stop burying their friends, family and coworkers.
Also: I will add that I know some of this is more vague, but I really cant say more specific than I have for a lot of reasons.