What’s next for the NBA? Draft, free agency, next season’s start date are open questions

Indeed, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver warned last week of “challenges” ahead for the league and its players, while Michele Roberts, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, referred to the just-completed playoffs as “the easy part” compared to the upcoming negotiations and planning that needs to be done for next season.

Little has been set in stone about the NBA’s future, with Silver acknowledging that the unpredictable nature and timeline of the pandemic, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans, leaves many unknowns.

“Nothing has really changed in this virus, as far as I know,” Silver said Sept. 30. “In fact, I think in the majority of states right now, cases are ticking back up again. There’s predictions of a combination of flu and coronavirus season. People are moving back indoors. In some cases, people have covid fatigue and aren’t following the same protocols. In many ways we’re looking at a lot of the same factors we looked at determining what to do this season.”

The following is an overview of 10 frequently asked questions about the NBA’s future after its successful bubble experiment. This story will update as new information becomes available.

The first step is to exhale after what Silver called “the longest season ever.” The NBA’s 2019-20 season took more than a calendar year from media day to the end of the Finals due to an unprecedented four-month hiatus prompted by the coronavirus in March. Players described mental and physical exhaustion in the bubble, and they will look to make the most of what is expected to be a condensed offseason.

The leaders of the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association won’t have much downtime. Shortly after the bubble ends, they will begin negotiations on a financial framework covering next season that will pave the way for a finalized schedule.

Both sides have expressed cautious optimism about those negotiations. The NBA and NBPA held extensive negotiations to conceive the bubble, and Silver said a spirit of “partnership” developed in the face of billions of lost revenue that impacted both sides. Roughly 40 percent of the NBA’s annual $8 billion revenue is tied to arena-related spending on tickets, concessions, parking and merchandise.

“We’re going to have at least one season that’s going to be challenging [financially],” Roberts said in late August. “We have to sit down like grown people, put aside the temptation to be greedy and appreciate the risks that are being taken by the players. I’m optimistic. We were able to do the work without lockouts and strikes [in 2017], and we should be able to do it again.”

The NBA’s comprehensive collective bargaining agreement was designed for normal operating terms, not a global pandemic that halts play and keeps fans out of arenas. The owners and players had to negotiate the terms of the bubble point by point, and they will need to follow the same process for next season because there is no way to guarantee in October exactly what the operating conditions will look like in January or even March.

“Everything that we’re doing exists outside the current collective bargaining agreement,” Silver said. “We need to negotiate everything — when training camp starts, when we start [the season], how we’re going to continue operating potentially under reduced [Basketball-Related Income] frankly. Those discussions are ongoing.”

The NBA’s salary cap is tied directly to “basketball-related income,” the league’s term for revenue. Over the past 35 years, the salary cap has shown annual declines just twice and never by more than $2.3 million. Silver’s tenure, meanwhile, has been defined by remarkable growth, with revenue doubling over the past decade. When Silver stepped in as commissioner in 2014, the salary cap was $58 million. That number has nearly doubled to $109 million this season, thanks in large part to lucrative new media rights deals.

The loss of months of arena revenue due to the coronavirus would therefore trigger the largest salary cap drop in NBA history if left unchecked. The implications of such a drop would be massive. Few teams would be able to hand out sizable contracts to free agents this fall. Some teams would unexpectedly be pushed into the luxury tax and be subjected to huge bills. Any offseason plans that teams had developed before March would be thrown out the window.

One possible solution to that economic chaos would be for the NBA and NBPA to agree to artificially hold the salary cap at or near its current level for next season. Pursuing such a compromise could serve as a financial bridge through the 2020-21 season and help the NBA maintain a sense of normalcy through the rest of the pandemic. In that scenario, upcoming free agents could still expect to have suitors, teams would have a decent amount of flexibility to tweak their rosters and owners wouldn’t need to worry about onerous and unexpected luxury tax bills during the pandemic.

League executives, owners and team executives are eager to get back to normal business as soon as it’s safe.

“Our goal next season is to play 82 games in home arenas in front of fans,” Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum said in late September.

Additionally, there is likely to be stiff resistance to another bubble from the players. They spent months away from their families in confined isolation, and the thought of reentering a similar lifestyle for part or all of a six-month season would likely be a tough sell, especially because the NFL and MLB are operating without bubbles.

At this point, the most likely scenario seems to be that the NBA would begin next season playing games in its arenas with or without fans, ramping up crowd capacity if and when it becomes feasible.

The 2020 NBA Draft, which was originally scheduled for June 25, has been rescheduled for Nov. 18.

“There’s a little asterisk next to it, saying it possibly could change, but that date has been essentially locked in,” Silver said. “We’re targeting that.”

In a typical year, the gap between the Finals and the Draft is usually a week or two. The Nov. 18 date is more than a month after the conclusion of the Finals, a larger-than-usual gap to accommodate negotiations.

The NBA has not yet officially set its free agency window because it must first agree to terms with the players union on the salary cap. In a typical year, free agency takes place about one week after the draft. If the league follows a similar timeline, free agency would likely take place in late November or at the start of December.

The best guess right now is that the 2020-21 NBA season will begin in or after January 2021. The NBA initially targeted Dec. 1 and Dec. 25 as possible start dates, but the players union has pushed back asking for more downtime following the season.

“I don’t know the answer to most of your questions,” Silver said Sept. 30, when asked broadly about what the path to next season looks like, noting that Christmas was the earliest possible start date and that January was a “more likely” time frame. “If we start in January, it means training camps have begun roughly three weeks earlier, and part of the consideration is that … [many of these players] … need a break physically and mentally.”

Roberts told The Athletic in early October that the regular season might not begin until “the latter part of January [or] February.”

In a typical NBA year, the Finals end in mid-June and media days begin in late September, providing a break of more than 100 days. If the NBA utilized its traditional timeline this year, media day would be held in mid-January and the start of the regular season would be pushed into February.

There is a desire from the league office to get the NBA back to its usual calendar cycle as soon as possible. The deeper the start of the season goes into January, the deeper the playoffs will run into the summer. For that reason, the NBA may condense its offseason to try to get the schedule back on track in future seasons.

It’s worth noting that next season’s All-Star Game was originally scheduled for Feb. 14, 2021, in Indianapolis. The NBA has not yet announced plans to delay, cancel or otherwise reschedule its annual midseason showcase.

This is one of the trickiest questions for the NBA, in part because the answer could be determined on an arena-by-arena basis. Before the league shut down in March, local and state government officials in California and Ohio issued orders preventing NBA teams from holding games in front of mass gatherings during the pandemic. Those types of regulations could still apply to some teams by the time next season begins, and different jurisdictions might have different limits on how many fans can attend a given game.

Silver has said that “additional advancements” like “rapid testing” will be necessary to get fans back in seats. If it becomes possible to administer coronavirus tests and get instant results, such a process could be added to the check-in procedure at NBA arenas and facilitate fan attendance.

“There are a lot of pharmaceutical companies focused on that,” Silver said. “There’s a huge marketplace for that.”

Portland Trail Blazers president Chris McGowan said that his organization has been preparing to host fans at the Moda Center at the start of the season by upgrading its cleaning procedures, air filtration systems and ticketing and entry processes. How many fans will be allowed to attend will be determined in part by mandates from Oregon’s Governor.

“It’s definitely important to get back open in some form or fashion, but we will never compromise safety for our fans, employees, and players until the risk is eliminated,” McGowan said. “The lion’s share of our time and energy is spent on the things we can control to make sure [the arena is] a safer environment.”

Across the league, executives are preparing for a gradual return to full capacity that could take months to play out unless a vaccine becomes available to the masses.

“I think you’ve got to assume [the return of fans] is going to be staged at some level,” McGowan said. “It will be different in every market. There’s not a blanket answer. Everyone is in a little bit different situation. We’re prepared to open. Hopefully we can open with some fans. Over time as the risk gets eliminated or we get better at [hosting crowds safely] and consumers feel comfortable, we can scale up and get back to a normal capacity.”

It seems highly unlikely that NBA players will be able to compete in the Tokyo Olympics, which were delayed by one year to July 2021 due to the coronavirus. In a typical year, players enjoy at least a few weeks off between the end of the Finals and the start of preparations for the Olympics. This year, the NBA’s regular season or postseason could still be in full swing when the Olympics start.

Silver told ABC on Oct. 2 that the NBA would “consider” pausing its season for the Olympics but that such a move would be “unlikely” because of the total time required for training, competing and rest afterward. The NBA’s priority will surely be to maximize its revenue-generating ability and simplify its schedule during the 2020-21 season rather than make major allowances for an international competition from which it doesn’t directly profit.

USA Basketball’s streak of three consecutive Olympic gold medals would be in jeopardy without LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry and other NBA superstars who might compete. Foreign players like Ben Simmons (Australia) and Rudy Gobert (France) would also be impacted.

The NBA has strong motivation to get its calendar back on track as quickly as possible. Television ratings for the Finals plummeted this year, in part because of increased competition from other sports like NFL, MLB and college football that are smaller factors or non-factors during the typical Finals window in June.

If the 2020-21 season ran from January through August, a condensed 2021 offseason could theoretically get the NBA back on track — or close — for a typical October-June calendar for 2021-22. Like most of the NBA’s long-term planning, it’s too soon to know for sure.