What does the NBA’s Dec. 22 start mean for the players?

The quick turnaround between NBA seasons will affect athletes’ mental and physical health in unprecedented ways.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected sports leagues across the world, but it’s hard to find a league that handled the virus better than the NBA. The NBA’s bubble in Walt Disney World was an astounding success, with zero positive cases inside the bubble and the entire playoffs played out until the Los Angeles Lakers were crowned champions on Oct. 11. All in all, it felt surprisingly normal.

The NBA is doubling down on its luck, tentatively agreeing with the NBPA on a Dec. 1 training camp and Dec. 22 start to a 72-game regular season. A lot of things are still unclear, including the salary cap, the potential play-in tournament, the schedule, and where the Toronto Raptors will even play.

But the league and its owners got the players association to agree to restart just 10 weeks removed from the NBA Finals despite a “substantial faction of players and star players pushing for NBA season to start Jan. 18,” according to Yahoo!’s Chris Haynes. The owners were dead-set on a pre-Christmas start due to a $500 million difference in television incentivized revenue for a December rather than mid-January start, and the players ultimately agreed because the owners presented them with an escrow-friendly deal that would withhold less salary than they originally predicted. After all, the 2020-21 season is a transition one, and the idea is for all sides to make sacrifices in order to be back to normalcy by 2021-22.

But that doesn’t mean a Dec. 22 restart is fair to NBA players, particularly ones that went deep into the playoffs and returned home from the bubble mere weeks ago. There are unprecedented mental, physical, and COVID-related obstacles related to such a quick turnaround.

NBA players’ mental health and family

“I guess health and wellness has basically gone out the window” is how ESPN’s Bobby Marks put it on a recent edition of “The Lowe Post” podcast.

The NBA has made great strides towards improving their mental health resources, requiring all teams to provide players with access to licensed, clinical mental health professionals ahead of the 2019-20 season. But for a league that says all the right things when it comes to mental health, this comes off as a giant step backward.

A Dec. 1 training camp and Dec. 22 regular season not only takes players away from their families before Christmas; it also means some players will have less than eight weeks between returning home from the bubble and setting off again for training camp — half the length of a typical NBA offseason.

And this isn’t a typical offseason: more than half the league is returning from a bubble environment where the players made huge sacrifices, living in a hotel without family for months on end. Inside the bubble, players had almost nothing to do except play basketball — they had no escape — and without the family members and loved ones they typically depend on, it proved to be a difficult experience mentally.

“I underestimated mental health, honestly,” Paul George said in the midst of the bubble. “I had anxiety, a little bit of depression, from being locked in here. I just wasn’t here, I was checked out.”

“It’s tough, it’s just really hard being in here. It’s not easy. All-day it’s just basketball, it’s hard to get away from it… [and] we’re all dealing with it.”

Players were also tasked with the incredibly difficult role of working two jobs at once: part basketball player, part political activist. The players chose to take on those responsibilities, but when the league and its media partners didn’t amplify the social issues they were in the bubble fighting for, players had little choice but to shoulder the responsibility themselves. The players’ strike following the police shooting of Jacob Blake was more of a reaction to their growing frustration and exhaustion than it was a premeditated strategy.

If you’re wondering how this fatigue can impact on the on-court product, James Redden, head of sports science at Luton Town football club, says: “Mental fatigue can affect physical performance as much as physical fatigue.”

NBA players’ physical health and injuries

“Definitely surprised” was how Bradley Beal summarized his thoughts on the Dec. 22 restart on a recent episode of “The Old Man and the Three” podcast with J.J. Redick. “Because I was under the impression that we wouldn’t start until February at the earliest.”

“It definitely changes my routine and how I’m working out and [how I] approach the rest of the winter up until the season. So it’s tough.”

For athletes who spend months progressively preparing for what is already an incredibly condensed and physically challenging season, it’s no wonder such a quick restart changes things. Players like Beal will have to alter their workout routines in order to better prepare for the season, but no matter what they do, it will be almost impossible to prepare for such an unprecedented workload.

The 2020-21 season will run through mid-May, with the playoffs lasting into July, making it just seven months in total compared to the normal eight. Sure, they are shaving 10 games off the schedule and planning on reducing travel, but such a compact season, along with the short turnaround, could be hard on players’ bodies regardless of how well they prepare.

It’s ironic that, after the bubble highlighted how good players could be given fresh legs, steady rest, and limited travel, the league is likely to go back to a heavy dose of back-to-backs and four games in five days. Such a compact season not only affects the level of basketball we will see, but it could also affect who gets to play that basketball.

NBA injuries are associated with greater fatigue and game load, according to a study in the Journal of Athletic Training that examined injury reports over three seasons, finding that the odds of injury increased by 2.87 percent for every 96 minutes played and decreased by 15.96 percent for each day of rest. Furthermore, a study in the National Library of Medicine found that playing back-to-back games and away games were significant predictors of frequent game injuries for NBA players.

Plus, the NBA has the advantage of looking at how other sports leagues have fared with short turnarounds, shorter pre-seasons, and more congested schedules. Look at the English Premier League, for example, which has seen 78 muscle injuries as of Oct. 23, a 42 percent increase from that stage in the previous campaign, in part due to players not having enough time to strengthen their muscles ahead of the season.

The NBA already has a very serious injury problem on its hands. In 2017-18, the number of NBA games lost to injury or illness surpassed the 5,000 mark for the first time since the league stopped using the injured reserve list prior to the 2005-06 campaign, which it again surpassed in 2018-19 (and came close in 2019-20), according to ESPN. Sure, some of this is due to the nature of AAU basketball and athletes entering the league with a high risk of injury, but the other part is the physical nature of the sport and the compact schedule, which the NBA was progressively trying to mend up until now.

COVID-19

“It’s interesting that, going into the bubble, there was so much discussion about parameters: whether this was going to work, how to keep it safe,” ESPN’s Zach Lowe said recently. “And now, as the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down — in fact, is getting worse… — there doesn’t seem to be as much angst and discussion about [COVID].”

“What if there’s an outbreak? It just feels like no one is talking about this and that is a reality that may spring up at some point.”

The United States is nearing 10 million cases of coronavirus, with the country recording 100,762 new cases on Sunday, marking the fifth-highest day of new cases in the country since the pandemic began. So while Lowe argues that COVID may spring up at some point in the NBA, I would be shocked if it didn’t.

Sure, the NBA will have some sort of rapid testing protocol in place to stop the spread of COVID within NBA arenas, but that doesn’t mean they are prepared to stop the spread outside of them.

In the NFL, where players are tested every day except on game days, half of the league’s teams currently have one to four players who are COVID-positive, forcing them and anyone who came into contact with them to quarantine. It has also forced NFL teams to shut down practice facilities and the league to reschedule games. Sure, football requires more personnel, but basketball is a much more intimate sport, played indoors and without protective equipment.

While you might be under the impression that young, healthy athletes are immune to the long-term effects of COVID, there is “increasing evidence that there may be mild — but very real — brain damage that occurs in many survivors, causing pervasive yet subtle cognitive, behavioral, and psychological problems,” according to the Harvard Medical Journal. This is part of the science that we have largely ignored in the Western world, but it suggests that we should be avoiding activities that put people in danger of contracting COVID, including sports.

The NBA has the reputation of a league that cares about its players’ mental and physical health and stands by progressive politics, but decisions such as pressuring players into a Dec. 22 restart call that reputation into question. Once again — just as they did with the bubble — the NBA is forcing players to choose between foregoing their salary or risking their health.

The choice is up to the players. But is it really?