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Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE via Getty Images
On Wednesday, just two weeks before the start of the second half of the NBA season, the league released the schedule for the final nine weeks of the 2020-2021 campaign. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the inevitability of missed games, the league initially created the schedule in two parts, giving themselves leeway to adjust on the fly.
In the first half of the year, several teams had entire weeks wiped out due to positive coronavirus tests or contact tracing issues. Some matches scheduled for the second half have already been caught on the first half rest days..
The schedule for the second half is even more compressed than that for the first half, with some teams having to compose an unequal number of competitions due to postponements 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 league announcement.
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Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press
Anthony Davis is not expected to return until the All-Star hiatus, and there is no guarantee that he will be completely gone when he returns. Achilles’ related injuries aren’t a snap, and the Lakers clearly care more about making sure he’s healthy for the playoffs than they do about securing the No.1 seed. 1 of the Western Conference.
Fortunately, their post-break schedule starts off pretty smoothly. Four of their first five games are at home, and their only road game in that streak 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 clashes against teams over .500 in the first week. Their next three games against the Minnesota Timberwolves, Charlotte Hornets and Atlanta Hawks, all teams they should be able to beat without Davis.
After that, the Lakers embark on a two-game road trip before ending March with four more home games, including against the Eastern Conference lottery teams in the Orlando Magic and Cleveland Cavaliers.
Even if Davis is taking a little longer than expected to come back, the Lakers should be able to keep pace just fine and prepare to enter the playoffs at full strength.
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Brandon Dill / Associated Press
Almost every team has had games impacted by league health and safety protocols, but a handful have been hit particularly hard and are paying the price at the back.
The Memphis Grizzlies second-half schedule features 40 games, a seven-game road trip, and a whopping 11 back-to-back.
The San Antonio Spurs also have 40 games to catch up in the 68 days leading up to the start of the play-in tournament, including seven in a row.
The Washington Wizards, who had the league’s first high-profile stoppage, played 38 games and seven back-to-backs.
The NBA will not allow a scenario like last year’s truncated regular season, where even after the eight “ranking games” in the bubble, not all teams played the same number of competitions. This year everyone should make it to 72 one way or another, even if that means some teams will have to play brutal schedules in the second half.
And that’s before taking into account the postponements in the second half. Hopefully, as vaccine rollout increases across the country, it becomes less of a problem between now and the playoffs. The first half of the season has shown us that nothing is guaranteed, but these teams are already playing from behind because of the blows their schedules have already taken.
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Phelan M. Ebenhack / Associated Press
The Golden State Warriors are currently 17-15, which puts them in eighth place in the Western Conference. They hold a one-game lead over the ninth-ranked Dallas Mavericks, but only three games ahead of the 11th-ranked New Orleans Pelicans.
With the new NBA play-in format for the last two seeds in each conference, marginal playoff teams have a small margin for error, and a bad week could lead a team to go down from an advantage over the pitch during the play-in to be outside watching the outlook drafts.
Fortunately for the Warriors, the planners have been kind to them. Their last six games are at home and the opponents are favorable.
They start with two straight games against the Oklahoma City Thunder, which should then be in full mode. Next are the Utah Jazz, who will likely have the No. 1 seed locked by then and may not be playing everyone; a tough game against the Phoenix Suns, who are also set to fight for the playoff standings; and they end with games against the New Orleans Pelicans and Memphis Grizzlies, the latter of which will complete an extremely difficult and compressed schedule to make up for all their postponements.
Assuming they stay healthy, the Warriors will have plenty of opportunities to get into a good position ahead of the play-in and immediately become the low seed that none of the top-ranked teams want to face in the first round. .
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Phelan M. Ebenhack / Associated Press
The New York Knicks are looking to advance to the playoffs for the first time in eight seasons. With a week before the All-Star break, they’re right on the verge of the playoff image.
The Knicks are currently tied at three with the Chicago Bulls and Charlotte Hornets for seventh in the East. They are only half a game away from the Boston Celtics for sixth place, which would allow them to avoid the play-in tournament, but they are only half a game ahead of the Miami Heat in 10th.
Barring a major injury, this race could end until the last week of the season, and the Knicks’ schedule to end it is brutal. They begin May with a six-game road trip that begins with a back-to-back game in Houston and Memphis and ends with games against four playoff teams from the Nuggets, Suns, Clippers and Lakers.
They are heading 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 tight race with in the standings.
The fate of the Knicks will be decided in these two weeks, and their path to the playoffs will not be easy. There can be extremely thin margins between avoiding the play-in tournament and missing the playoffs altogether.
The Knicks have been one of the surprise successes of the season so far, but they have a tough road ahead to maintain the win and return to the playoffs.
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Michael Dwyer / Associated Press
Unsurprisingly, the two teams with the most televised games nationally in the second half of the season are the Lakers with 21 and the Nets with 20, according to ESPN Statistics and Information.
Planners had to budget for 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 games until March 23. By then, Davis will be back.
Brooklyn, meanwhile, begins the second half with a home game against the Celtics on TNT and faces the Knicks four days later on ESPN.
The Nets’ season has been full of saves and starts since they traded to James Harden. Kevin Durant has already missed 14 games due to various passages in health and safety protocol and minor injuries. But they’ve been thrilling to watch when Durant, Harden, and Kyrie Irving are all healthy, and fans will have plenty of opportunities to see them on national television in the second half of the season.
Elsewhere on the national TV show, there are three Bucks-Sixers clash that will be crucial in the race for the East seed, and stars like Damian Lillard, Zion Williamson and Luka Doncic will be on display extensively. Even the Charlotte Hornets, who are often overlooked but now feature an upcoming star in LaMelo Ball, will be on TNT against Brooklyn on April 1.
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Mike Stobe / Associate Press
The compressed schedule of the second half is heavy on back-to-backs and road trips, which will hardly give players time to recover. Injury is probably inevitable, which is unfortunate.
The only way playoff teams can avoid this is to put their star players through some of the toughest times on the calendar to make sure they’re healthy for the playoffs.
It’s an inevitable truth of the calendar, just as it did during the 2011-12 lockout season, which also crammed a lot of games in a short period of time and featured increased injuries. Over the next nine seasons, teams have become much more forward-thinking when it comes to player rest, and it won’t be a surprise if teams are resting their best players more than usual.
While this makes sense from a health standpoint, it’s a bummer for fans. It’s already a strange and divisive season to follow given the realities of the pandemic, inconsistent policies across different cities to allow fans into arenas, and uncertainty as to when things will return to normal.
Add to that the higher than usual probability that a marquee match won’t feature, for example, Stephen Curry or Giannis Antetokounmpo, and there could be a lot of disappointing matches in the second half of the season.
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