NBA guidelines on re-opening are coming on June 1st

On March 11th, the NBA, along with most other major sports, suspended their seasons back in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. After the initial shock wore off, the question everyone wanted to know was when of if sports would be coming back.

Adrian Wojnarowski and ESPN are now reporting that the league is set to release guidelines on June 1st that will allow teams to recall players to their home markets and also potentially offer more information on expanding team activities.

The early indications are that Commissioner Adam Silver may unveil a plan to resume the season by the end of June — something that was beginning to seem more and more unlikely as the weeks passed with no news. Even more interesting, then, that the league doesn’t seem content to just bring back teams for a truncated playoff run.

In fact, the early information is that Silver and the NBA are still working out how to incorporate additional regular season games and possibly even a play-in tournament. The league is considering, when teams do return, a two-site format that would see the bulk of the games split between being played at Walt Disney World in Orlando and Las Vegas.

The NBA and NBPA will still need to discuss how exactly the rest of the 2019-20 season will play out, so nothing is set in stone. There are numerous CBA negotiations which would have to take place in a hurry.

So... that’s pretty wild. I was beginning to lose hope that we’d get any kind of conclusion to the season; an extremely unsatisfying end to what was looking like the Mavericks first post-season action in four years. Now it appears that not only is the league still determined to crown a champion, but there’s potential for all kinds of wacky asterisks to be tacked on to any potential league champ (*The Lakers are your 2020 NBA Champions after getting a favorable post season draw when the Trailblazers knocked the Jazz out of the playoffs in the play-in tournament and then were able to hole up in Cinderella’s castle for the entirety of the postseason, fending off many attempts from the Clippers to storm the castle, whose failures meant they were forced to take up lodging in the abandoned “It’s a Small World” ride..

What’s more, the ESPN’s article, Luka Doncic is called out by name as a player who chose not to heed the league’s recommendations against traveling out of the country. With no possible way of knowing where the superstar 21-year-old has gotten to now, the Mavericks organization might have no choice but to assemble a Suicide Squad comprised of Willie Cauley-Stein, Michael Kidd-Gilchrest and Courtney Lee to embark on a dangerous rescue mission to bring home the Dallas point guard.

You’re worried. How can we trust a squad made up of trade deadline projects and journeyman vets to retrieve the Mavericks’ most valuable asset? Friend, I haven’t even told you who the captain of the team is.

You thought he was dead! You thought you’d never see him again! But now Ryan Broekhoff is the only man who can ensure the Dallas Mavericks arise from this chaos to become the 2020 NBA Champions! Coming this summer... maybe. Who even knows.