LA Clippers: 3 Cons of a Christmas Start to the Season
If the rumors about the season starting around Christmas are true, there will be some reasons for concern for the LA Clippers.
There’s nothing confirmed, but the buzz around the NBA is that the league is pushing for a December 23rd start to the 2020-21 season. If that’s the case, there’s only 8 weeks between now and the first regular season game for the LA Clippers!
Earlier today we talked about some of the ways that will benefit the Clippers, but there will be some drawbacks for the team as well.
1) Kawhi will still need to load manage
One concern that fans of the LA Clippers will have is the play schedule for star Kawhi Leonard. We still don’t know what his load management schedule is going to be, but a safe guess is that it will look similar to last season, in which he didn’t play both games of back-to-backs.
There’s no set end date for the season if it starts in December, but we can assume they would like to avoid messing with the schedule for 2021-22. Not to mention, while they may end up being cancelled, and while the NBA administration doesn’t care much about them it seems, the Olympics are currently slated to start on July 23rd.
We can compare this to the lockout-shortened 2011-12 NBA season, when the first regular season game was on Christmas day and only 66 games were played. In that season, the postseason started on April 28th, which was a 4 month season.
In that season, teams played 2 extra games a month, and there were 42 instances of back-to-back-to-back games. There were also 29 cases of a team playing 5 games in 6 days.
Will this season look like that? One hopes that the league has learned more about player wellness and won’t subject their player to that much strain. But it’s going to be really hard, potentially impossible to pull this kind of season off without increasing the back-to-backs or at least a heavier workload.
If that happens, we could see less of Kawhi Leonard in the regular season. If the medical team says this is the best treatment for his injury, which I absolutely believe, then it’s unavoidable. But it could still lead to fewer games for our star, and potentially a lower regular season win total.