“Look, for us, our season is basically over. If the league was somehow to start up again, it’s very unlikely we would be playing regular-season games given that they’d be in such a time crunch.”
That was Warriors’ coach Steve Kerr speaking a few weeks ago about the Golden State’s lack of motivation to return to play regular season games in a “bubble” somewhere. Kerr is not speaking in a vacuum, Nets’ owner Joesph Tsai said recently motivation is lacking for a number of teams at the bottom of the league to expend money and effort for games with little to no meaning (and no gate revenue). The Warriors can say Kerr’s comments were taken out of context (he did say he understood the motivation for contending teams to return), but Kerr isn’t wrong.
Despite that, if the league says teams need to report to a bubble city for some regular season games, the Warriors will be there, GM Bob Myers told Ramona Shelburne of ESPN.“The truth is we have the worst record in the league. That’s a fact,” Myers said. “It’s hard to motivate in our unique position. But that doesn’t mean players don’t have pride and won’t come back and play and care about the league as a whole. We want to be good partners and we will be good partners.
“We’d like to see Steph [Curry] play with [Andrew] Wiggins; I think we got to see that for one game where we were hoping to see that.”
Of course if the league calls the Warriors will show up. Should they get that call is another question.
The league office would love to play some regular season games and help regional sports networks. However, Adam Silver told players on a conference call Friday as the lockdown moves into the summer it may not be possible to play enough games for teams out of the playoffs to pass teams already in, and the league may go straight to the postseason.
It’s a matter of timing. Silver said there would be at least three weeks of training camp in the bubble before games are played, plus ESPN was told it would take at least 55 days to complete a full playoff bracket to play out. That is 76 days minimum, meaning to end the season on Sept. 13 the NBA has to open training camps at the end of June. That is without one regular season game played. Since opening training camps much earlier is unlikely, the only to get in enough regular season games to be meaningful is to extend the season, possibly into October. Which starts to push back the goal of starting next season in December.
Nobody knows if or when the season will restart, and what format everything will take. Regular season games being played are not out of the question, because nothing is. However, most likely, Kerr and Myers will have to wait until next season to season starts to see Stephen Curry and Andrew Wiggins together, and then they can throw Klay Thompson in the mix.