With the NBA set to get things going officially next month, the league released on Wednesday an update on its schedule.
In contrast to its traditional format, the league will play just 72 games this season, ten fewer than the customary 82-game schedule. The breakdown goes as follows, based from their release:
Each team will play three games against each intraconference opponent (42 total games per team), with each pairing featuring either two home games and one road game or one home game and two road games. Within each team’s division, the league office has randomly assigned which two opponents will be played twice at home and which two opponents will be played twice on the road.
All five teams from within a division will play all five teams from one other intraconference division twice at home, and all five teams from the remaining intraconference division twice on the road.
Each team will play two games against each interconference opponent (30 total games per team), with each pairing featuring one home game and one road game.
The NBA has also integrated an "All-Star break" between March 5-10, 2021, which splits the regular season into two halves. The Second Half will integrate games potentially postponed that were slotted into the First Half schedule. The league will release the First Half schedule in early December during the start of training camp, with the Second Half to be announced later during the campaign.
Another tweak to the upcoming season is the return of the "Play-In Tournament." Introduced last season in the bubble, the upcoming edition has been altered to involved teams with the seventh to tenth-best winning percentages in each conference full stop. This is different from the previous instance, which needed an additional criteria to invoke the play-in.
The 2020-21 Play-In Tournament format for each conference is as follows:
Teams with the seventh and eighth-best records will have a playoff to determine the seventh seed, which they will call the Seven-Eight Game. The ninth and tenth-best records will have their own matchup, called the Nine-Ten Game.
The winner of the Seven-Eight Game secures the seventh seed. The loser will face the winner of the Nine-Ten Game for the right to be the eighth seed.
Teams with the better record coming into the Play-In Tournament will be playing in their home venue during this short stretch.
The full specifics on the league's 2020-21 schedule can be broken down as follows:
December 11-19, 2020: NBA Preseason
December 22, 2020 to March 4, 2021: First Half of the Regular Season
March 5-10, 2021: All-Star Break
March 11 - May 16, 2021: Second Half of Regular Season
May 18-21, 2021: Play-In Tournament
May 22 - July 22, 2021: NBA Playoffs
No comments:
Post a Comment