Winners and losers of the NBA’s plan to restart the 2019-20 season

Winner: You and me!

Basketball is back, baby! It’s going to be weird, for sure. We’re going to have to adjust to games played in an unfamiliar settings, without fans in the arena. Even with some sort of abbreviated training camp, players will still be coming off lengthy layoffs, trying to recapture the rhythm they built up over the regular season. It might be sloppy at first. It might be bizarre to watch. But it will actually be there for us to watch.

And not just that, several reports today intimated that we may be looking at an NCAA-style format with day games and multiple games being played each day. It’s going to be an event and you might not have to choose between games airing at the same time. No travel between games means fewer layoffs between and during playoff series. It’s not just a basketball spigot the league is turning on, its going to feel like a firehose.

There are plenty of moving parts still to work out and, again, the whole thing is still very fragile. We want everyone to be healthy and safe but we’re closer to actual basketball than we’ve been at any point in the past few months. If the NBA can pull it off, we’ll all be winners for it.