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.
2) The season becomes a trial by fire
When he was hired by the LA Clippers, Ty Lue pledged that he wanted to run a faster pace and mentioned that the stars were going to have to adjust to his system.
Ideally, you’d like for some of that adjustment to happen in training camps and in games that don’t matter. But if we’re currently 8 weeks away from the first game of the season, that’s not going to happen.
Instead, the team is going to have to figure things out as the regular season progresses. That’ll be an unfortunate amount of deja vu for fans of the team. The prevailing sentiment when the Clippers struggled in the last regular season was “they’ll put it together. They’ll figure things out.” Now it looks like the team might have to figure things out again, but with fewer games to do it.
Of course, things will be different. There’s a new head coach, new assistant coaches, and probably some changes in the roster. We can only hope that’s enough to help this team get things together more quickly than last year.
Another issue Lue pointed out in his press conference was that he believed the well-publicized chemistry issues were mostly a matter of the team not spending much time playing together. Well, a shortened NBA season with (I would assume) a reduced or non-existent preseason will give the team less time to mesh.
It’s nothing insurmountable. With proper coaching and buy-in from the players, they can come together and figure out the chemistry issues and the new system, and play like the world-beaters we know they can be. The scary thing is just that we were saying the same thing early in last season.
3) There will be a limited Free Agency/Trade period
While introducing Ty Lue, LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and PBO Lawrence Frank mentioned that they need to be careful and precise in improving the roster with limited assets. This meshes well with Brian Windhorst on his podcast, who said he expects this to be a free agency with a lot of sign and trades, and that he expects the Clippers to be aggressive in that market.
If the season really is going to start in late December, the Clippers don’t have much time, so they’ll need to make their improvements quickly. The NBA draft is currently slated to be in mid November, so free agency could be as short as just a few weeks.
The front office is going to have to be quick about any moves they want to make, and the coaching staff will have to be efficient at integrating any rookies or free agents or trade acquisitions the team makes.
I don’t expect any major trades to get made this offseason, so it won’t be as drastic as trying to integrate another star into the system. But if the team makes a move for another big or a playmaker, it will have to be a quick process to get them into the rotation.
I trust this front office to be able to make the moves they need in time, but it is not going to be easy. They’ll be aided by the fact that nobody really pays attention to when free agency is “supposed” to start, and they will have one or two deals done or nearly done at the instant free agency opens.
Where this is really going to be felt is when it comes to those late signings. Think JaMychal Green re-signing three weeks into free agency, or Patrick Patterson signing a month and a half in. Those signings are going to have to be hurried along this offseason, which could play against the Clippers. They won’t have the time to wait out the market and find deals so easily.
How do you feel about a Christmastime restart? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter, and stay tuned here on Clipperholics for all things LA Clippers!