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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 begins, the league released 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 two-part schedule, giving themselves leeway to adjust instantly.
In the first half, several teams had been wiped out for weeks due to positive coronavirus tests or contact tracking problems. Some games that were reserved for the second half have already been made up on days off in the first half
The second half schedule is even more compressed than the first half, with some teams having to make up for an odd number of games due to a delay in the first half. In other words, some teams will have a harder time than others.
Here are the winners and losers from Wednesday’s announcement of the competition.
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Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press
Anthony Davis is not expected to return for the All-Star hiatus, and there is no guarantee he will be full when he returns. Achilles-related injuries are nothing to play with, and the Lakers are clearly giving more to making sure he is healthy for the playoffs than getting the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference.
Fortunately, their schedule starts off quite gently after the break. Four of their first five games are at home, and their only road game on that stretch is in San Francisco against the Golden State Warriors (which comes after two days off).
Their first two games, against the Indiana Pacers and Warriors, are their only match-ups against more than .500 teams in the first week. Their next three come against the Minnesota Timberwolves, Charlotte Hornets, and Atlanta Hawks, all teams they should be able to beat without Davis.
Then, the Lakers will go on a two-game road trip before closing March with four more games at home, 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 should be able to keep up with the pace and set themselves up to get into the playoffs full blast.
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Brandon Dill / Associated Press
Just about every team has had games affected by the league’s health and safety protocols, but a handful were hit particularly hard, paying the price at the back.
The Memphis Grizzlies’ second half schedule includes 40 games, a road trip of seven games and a whopping 11 back-to-backs.
The San Antonio Spurs also have 40 games to make up in the 68-day period to the start of the play-in tournament, including seven back-to-backs.
The Washington Wizards, who had the league’s first high-profile shutdown, have 38 games and seven back-to-backs.
The NBA does not allow a scenario like last year’s shortened regular season, where even after the eight “seeding games” in the bubble, not every team had played the same number of games. This year, everyone should get to 72 somehow, even if that means some teams have to play brutal second-half schedules.
And that’s before any delay in the second half is taken into account. Hopefully, as the rollout of vaccines increases across the country, the playoffs will make this less of an issue. The first half of the season has shown us that nothing is guaranteed, but these teams are already playing from behind because of the hits that their schedules have already achieved.
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Phelan M. Ebenhack / Associated Press
The Golden State Warriors are currently 17-15, placing them in eighth place in the Western Conference. They are one game ahead of ninth-place Dallas Mavericks, but only three games ahead of the eleventh New Orleans Pelicans.
With the NBA’s new play-in format for the last two seeds in each conference, marginal playoff teams have a small margin of error, and a bad week could cause a team to change from home advantage in the play-in to one on the outside looking at draft perspectives.
Fortunately for the Warriors, the roster makers were nice to them. Their last six games are at home and the opponents are favorable.
They’ll start with two consecutive games against the Oklahoma City Thunder, which should be in full tank mode by then. Next up is the Utah Jazz, which will likely have locked up the No. 1 seed by then and may not be playing everyone; a tough game against the Phoenix Suns, who would also have to compete for the seeding position in the playoffs; and they close with games against the New Orleans Pelicans and Memphis Grizzlies, the latter of which will round out a hugely difficult and compressed schedule to make up for all their postponements.
Assuming they stay sane, the Warriors will have plenty of opportunities to put themselves in a good position in the play-in – and immediately become the low-seed that none of the higher-seeded teams want to take up in the first round.
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Phelan M. Ebenhack / Associated Press
The New York Knicks want to reach the playoffs for the first time in eight seasons. With a week to go before the All-Star break, they are right on the brink of the late season.
The Knicks are currently level with the Chicago Bulls and Charlotte Hornets for seventh place in the East. They are only half a game behind the Boston Celtics for sixth place, which could avoid the play-in, but they are only half a game ahead of 10th place Miami Heat.
Barring a major injury, this race could end in the last week of the season, and the Knicks’ schedule to end it is brutal. They’ll kick off a six-game road trip in May that begins with back-to-back 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 thrilling race with in the standings.
The fate of the Knicks will be decided in those two weeks and their path to the playoffs will not be easy. There can be razor thin margins between avoiding the play-in tournament and missing the play-offs completely.
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 keep profits going and return to the playoffs.
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Michael Dwyer / Associated Press
Unsurprisingly, the two teams with the most nationally televised games in the second half of the season are the Lakers at 21 and the Nets at 20, according to ESPN statistics and info
The schedule makers must have built in a slightly longer recovery time for Davis (see above), as the Lakers only have one ESPN game in the first two weeks and no TNT game until March 23. Hopefully Davis will be back by then.
Brooklyn, meanwhile, starts the second half with a home game against the Celtics on TNT and plays the Knicks on ESPN four days later.
The Nets season is full of stops and has started since they traded for James Harden. Kevin Durant has already missed 14 games due to various stints in the health and safety protocol and minor injuries. But they were thrilling to see 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 show, there are three Bucks-Sixers matchups that will be pivotal 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 attention. Even the Charlotte Hornets, often forgotten but now starring at LaMelo Ball, will be on TNT against Brooklyn on April 1.
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Mike Stobe / Associated Press
The compressed second half schedule is tough for back-to-backs and road trips, leaving players running out of time to recover. Injuries are likely inevitable, which is a shame.
The only way for playoff teams to avoid that is to have their star players sit in one of the more difficult parts of the schedule to make sure they are healthy for the playoffs.
This is an inevitable truth of the schedule, as it was in the 2011-12 lockout season, which also crammed many games into a short space of time and showed an increase in injuries. In the nine seasons since then, teams have become much more progressive when it comes to player rest, and it should come as no surprise when teams rest their best players more than usual.
While this makes sense from a health standpoint, it is a bummer for fans. This is already a strange and contradictory season to follow given the realities of the pandemic, inconsistent policies across cities to admit fans into arenas, and uncertainty about when things will return to normal.
Add to that the more than usual likelihood that a marquee matchup will not feature Stephen Curry or Giannis Antetokounmpo, for example, and there could be a lot of disappointing games in the second half of the season.