The NBA has recently been discussing and researching possible major changes to scheduling and the current playoff format, with one idea that has gained apparent traction being the concept of a soccer-style midseason tournament.
There has been push back on that from some players and the question of how they will make it worthwhile for teams and players to be invested in such a tournament has been a topic of debate. The league was initially planning on putting these new measures to a vote at the upcoming Board of Governors meeting in April, which at one time, at least, also included the idea of a play-in game for the final two seeds in each conference and re-seeding the final four teams to get rid of conference finals in favor of possible cross-conference matchups.
However, on Thursday it was reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and confirmed by Marc Stein of the New York Times that the vote was being pushed back to a later date due to a variety of factors, but generally it seems the league did not believe it had the votes at this time to ensure things would get passed.
NBA has informed teams that it will continue to take long look at changes to NBA calendar, but will no longer take a vote of the NBA's Board of Governors in April, sources tell ESPN.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 17, 2020
NBA has been working closely with teams, NBPA and stakeholders and wants to continue studying how in-season tournament, play-in for 7/8 seeds and re-seeding of Final Four could best be planned and monetized in the long-run. League plans an update for owners at April BOG meeting.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 17, 2020
Among concerns for key elements of calendar changes, league feedback on in-season tournament has been to protect existing events like Christmas Day games. Re-seeding of Final 4 continues to have travel concerns. More time to discuss and study it all now.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 17, 2020
The feeling in NBA circles remains that a play-in playoff tournament and an in-season tournament will still be adopted by the league … but teams were indeed notified today that there will be NO vote in April
— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) January 17, 2020
As @NYTSports first reported Dec. 31, teams have been voicing "strong concern" for some time about proposals to re-seed the playoffs at the conference finals stage … which has raised the possibility that the NBA will abandon the idea to re-seed those four teams
— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) January 17, 2020
The second tweet from Woj seems to highlight the biggest obstacle standing in the way for the league getting approval to make such major changes, in that owners will want to see a plan for how these schedule changes will, at minimum, replace revenue from removing regular season games, if not adding revenue overall. Beyond that, that concerns over travel if reseeding the conference finals has been an issue and right now it seems that, with this many questions, the league realized it’d be best to push a vote back to try and have more concrete answers to get to the right number of votes.
Woj notes the league wanted to implement the changes for the 2021-22 season, but that with the vote being moved back that will be tricky given how many moving parts will be involved. Still, the expectation seems to be that changes are coming to the schedule, but how big those changes will be and what areas of this initial plan will be changed or scrapped remains to be seen.
