How the hiatus affects all 30 NBA teams

Assuming the 2019-20 NBA season is just suspended and not canceled, here’s how the upcoming hiatus might affect each and every team.

It’s been just over a week since the NBA officially suspended its season, and if you’re anything like us, you’re already missing basketball immensely.

It’s not just that every other major sports league/event has been canceled, or that most of us are currently quarantined at home — it’s that this season, there was no unassailable dynasty at the top of the food chain. The NBA crown was there for the taking, and in such a wide-open year, with so many stars on the rise, fans were gearing up for a memorable stretch run of regular season games and a legitimately exciting postseason.

Unfortunately, what began as a 30-day hiatus has quickly spiraled into something much longer as the country tries to get novel coronavirus under control. The league did the right thing by suspending play in the wake of this unfortunate pandemic, because this situation goes way beyond basketball. All the same, it leaves us craving the sport we love and wondering what might have happened if the rest of the year had played out as planned.

More than likely, NBA basketball will be on hold until June or July at the earliest. The association could return with a truncated schedule, cancel the rest of the regular season and jump straight into the playoffs based on the current seeding, or wind up cancelling everything altogether depending on how this ongoing situation pans out.

In the interest of providing the good people with a more optimistic point of view, we’re going to operate under the premise that we haven’t seen the last of the 2019-20 campaign, that we’ll get at least a few regular season games before diving right back into the playoffs, and that we’ll crown a champion as we normally do.

Given these guidelines, how will this 3-4 month layover affect each team in the association? Aside from the obvious of everyone being rusty and missing basketball, it’s time to look at where each team left off the 2019-20 regular season, and what they might look like once the NBA is back. We’ll proceed in alphabetical order, starting with the Atlanta Hawks.