NBA News: Could Christmas Day mark the start of 2020-21 season?

The NBA has taken no options off the table for how the 2020 season will finish, and is now opening up possibilities for how next season will take place, too

This year has not gone according to plan for the NBA, not even close.

The year started with drama with China, stemming from comments Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey made standing with protestors in Hong Kong. This resulted in a substantial loss of international revenue from one of their long-lasting streaming partners in Asia.

Then, in mid-March, as we know and have been living through for the last several weeks, coronavirus took over. Rudy Gobert tested positive and the NBA world, no, the world shifted as we know it.

The NBA and other sports leagues had no choice. It simply wouldn’t be safe for players, fans, arena employees, or anyone to have games played as normal.

In some localities, games in front of fans were banned, but the NBA was more or less forced to suspend its season after the Gobert incident before those eerie empty arena games were played.

Now, it’s considering all options for how to wrap up the 2020 season. With more than half of the regular season recorded, it’s undesirable to write off the conclusion of this year. Having closure and deeming a champion seems to be the goal of the league, even if that looks vastly different this year than in years prior.

They’ve taken no options off the table — to be clear, a cancellation of the season does still seem to be in the realm of possibility — and the most likely scenario seems to be finishing the season in the summer or fall months.

And yes, that means next year is now going to be impacted, too, and the NBA calendar as a whole could be completely shifted.

In an interview with Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter, Adrian Wojnarowski talked about the possibility of the 2021 season having a delayed start. Per Woj, the NBA is “more willing than ever” to delay next season.

As far as how this would look, no one knows yet, but the season could be shortened altogether, or it could be slid down the calendar completely.

While this isn’t a certain outcome — I’d love an NBA in which the season kicked off on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.

For quite some time, the season hasn’t garnered intense national popularity until the slate of Christmas Day games anyway, and the tradition of stacking the schedule with high-stakes matchups from noon until 1am EST has worked quite well.

For the NBA, it’s the equivalent to Thanksgiving for the NFL. You open gifts, you eat food with family, you watch basketball.

Plenty of casual fans ignore the late October, November, and early December games. For the most part, the lengthy 82-game schedule doesn’t feel important with college football and the NFL taking precedence for most sports fans in those months, the real race and joking for playoff position heightens in February and March.

So, let’s picture a season that is 40-62 games long, starts on Christmas Day, each game meaning more. In the case of a 40-ish game season, every game basically means double the amount that it means in a standard 82-game season.

The pressure to win games stacked up with a shorter clock, effectively just three months if the league tries to keep the standard April, May and June playoff format, would be incredible. It adds a sense of urgency and could inject a thrill to the regular season that we haven’t felt in some time.

It remains to be seen how this year and next will press on for the NBA, but how the league responds with potential scheduling changes could create the most exciting season ever in 2021.

I, for one, would love to wake up on Christmas Day with the start to a brand new NBA season.