After the pause of the NBA’s 2019-20 regular season due to Covid-19, the NBA successfully finished the season months later locked into a bubble and without nearly the issues that the NFL and MLB have run into after they restarted their seasons.

The season ended crowning the Los Angeles Lakers as champions over the underdog Miami Heat in six games.

When does the NBA season start for 2021?

It’s been just a few weeks since LeBron James captured his fourth NBA Championship and the league is already deep in discussions about when to start the next season.

Even though Adam Silver has said the next season wouldn’t likely start until 2021, recent reports suggest that the next season could begin sooner than that. In fact this past week, many insiders have made their predictions and some have pegged the start date for the 2020-21 season before Christmas time.

As of this post, the proposed start date for the 2021 NBA season is Tuesday, December 22, 2020 with training camp beginning on December 1st, 2020. All of this isn’t locked in of course. The league is reportedly strong on that start date and they’re in negotiations are ongoing with the NBPA.

A Very Off Off-Season

The pandemic forced the NBA to play the NBA Finals into mid-October when the season usually ends three months earlier in July. In order for the league to get back onto their normal schedule, decisions have to made sooner than later.

The league could choose to get back on their normal Oct-May regular season over the next few years, pushing up the start date by a month over the 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24 seasons, but there are other considerations that are forcing the NBA’s hand.

The 2020 Olympics were rescheduled for the 2021 summer, so that makes it difficult for the NBA to just pave over through July and August in order to make up for a later start. Not only that, an extended season put the NBA up against the NFL in terms of viewership — in other words, lost revenue.

There’s a lot of money hanging in the balance with whatever the NBA decides. Everything from the stores selling official NBA jerseys, bookmakers and online casinos like Fun 88, and not to mention the millions of sponsorship and advertising money lost with each passing day.

Continuing on the lost money subject, the longer the league waits to start the 2020-21 season, the fewer games will be played in the regular season which means a lot of lost money for the league, the teams, and the players.

This is not to mention that we’re not out of the pandemic yet, so how will the NBA manage playing 60-70 games? Will they force the players to all play in a bubble again, or some form of staggered season that limits travel that allows for testing and quarantining?

There’s so many other considerations that we can’t (and won’t) list here, but this is all to say that the NBA has a lot more to consider for the 2020-21 season.