April 10, 2020
NBA teams are uniting in a push to move the NBA Draft back until at least August, according to a new report from Adrian Wojnarowski and Jonathan Givony of ESPN, a move that signals the hurdles of conducting the pre-draft process in the current times but also of what the league may have to do to keep hope of finishing the season alive.
The draft, which would otherwise be held on June 25th, has already been altered by the indefinite suspension of workouts and in-person meetings teams typically start holding between the start of the playoffs and the draft itself. Wojnarowski and Givony reported Friday that these changes have forced teams to consider moving back the date in order to preserve, "essential elements" of the pre-draft process.
Multiple top team executives expressed to ESPN their belief that shifting the draft date would give organizations more time to salvage the essential elements of the pre-draft process, possibly allowing for in-person workouts, interviews and medical evaluations of prospects that current social distancing and shelter-in-place guidelines make impossible.
For now, the NBA remains on commissioner Adam Silver's timeline of May 1 as the earliest that decisions on the remaining league calendar will start to be made, sources said. An Aug. 1 date would be flexible, based on whether the league restarts and advances the regular season and playoffs through the summer. In that case, most envision a September draft and free-agency period based on a season that concludes around Labor Day weekend.
Among front-office executives, there is an expectation that no draft would occur while teams are still engaged in the season, because that would preclude an important element of draft night: player trades. That's why team officials believe the draft and free agency should stay connected on the calendar once the season ends. [ESPN]
Weighing those components of the pre-draft process are a key part of any player evaluation, although teams have been instructed they can have up to four hours of video conferencing with prospects during the pre-draft process, allowing for some human component to remain.
Holding the draft in June considering the current circumstances always seemed impossible, and teams coming together to push for this suggests there is a degree of optimism about restarting the league eventually, or at least keeping up the illusion that a return is possible. Drafting before finishing (or canceling) a season would be a head-scratcher — there's no real way for playoff teams to assess their biggest needs and desires without seeing how their group looks in a playoff format against the best competition.
That certainly applies to the Sixers, who have stressed they believe they have a team built for the playoffs since assembling the primary components last summer. The logic has been put to the test throughout a rocky season, but a dominant home record and wins over top-quality competition like the Lakers, Clippers, Bucks, and other hopeful contenders suggests there is a threatening team lurking there somewhere beneath the surface.
It could cut either way, in theory. Perhaps a playoff run would show the problems of the regular season are not as complicated or dire as they seem, or perhaps the Sixers would need to make major transactions on draft night to reconfigure the roster once more. At the very least, moving the draft back through August gives them time to take stock of the situation, from the roster right on up through the front office, weighing whether major changes are necessary to move the program forward.
Of note: the Sixers do not own their own pick but would currently have a first-round pick in this year's draft courtesy of the Oklahoma City Thunder, via the protected pick Philadelphia received in the Markelle Fultz trade with Orlando. The pick is top-20 protected and OKC currently sits tied for 21st in the overall league standings, with razor-thin margins between selections 18-24. In that sense, a canceled season would benefit them in some small way by preserving the rights to that pick, all other pitfalls aside.
(This assumes, of course, that the legalese of the collective bargaining agreement would preserve the draft order in the case of a pandemic cancellation. Though it seems the logical thing to do, truthfully I am not certain if there is an actual policy in place for such a scenario.)
The people who get screwed in this scenario, of course, are draft-eligible players. Changes to the pre-draft process have given underclassmen at least some ability to test the waters and return to college if the feedback they received isn't to their liking, but a pushback of the draft date would complicate that considerably.
The Labor Day weekend timeline for the season mentioned by Wojnarowski and Givony would have players having to potentially stick through the draft process late into the summer months, complicating not just their roster spots but their ability to register for classes should they return to their respective schools. Though this wouldn't necessarily impact graduating players, the underclassmen who comprise a huge chunk of any given draft would have another component to factor into their decisions, especially if COVID-19 related restrictions continue to change the pre-draft landscape.
If you were looking for a sign of hope that sports may return this summer, this may be sign that it's not quite dead yet.
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