Who Wins the Most If the NBA Season Gets Cancelled?

Everyone loses, of course, but there’s a silver lining to every cloud. Who might actually come out as relative winners of a cancelled 2019–20 NBA season?

WHAT IF THE 2019-20 NBA SEASON GETS CANCELLED? It’s an ugly question but one we are forced to ask, one whose potential grows with each passing day of quarantine. Coronavirus has become the story of 2020, and the world of sports has come to a screeching halt.

We don’t know how long this will all last or when things will return to “normal,” and no one knows what comes next for sports. The NBA continues to delay any major decisions. We should be watching second-round playoff games right now, but we haven’t had basketball for almost two months. And every week that passes brings us closer and closer to the terrible reality of the entire 2019–20 NBA season being cancelled, playoffs and all.

There are much worse problems in the world, of course, but let’s focus on basketball today. What if the season does get cancelled? What if there’s simply no viable solution to allow the rest of the season to play out safely?

There are a lot of losers in that scenario, but there’s a silver lining in every cloud, and there may be a few relative “winners” in this mess, even if you have to squint pretty hard to see them. So who are the five biggest winners if the 2020 NBA season gets cancelled?

5. The San Antonio Spurs playoff streak

Where were you in 1997?

You’ve probably been thinking about that lately now that Carmen Electra, Outkast, and Chicago resident Barack Obama are back in our lives. Yes, 1997 was so long ago that they hadn’t even started filming The Last Dance for Michael Jordan’s final ride with the Chicago Bulls. In ‘97 everyone was obsessed with the Spice Girls, the Teletubbies, and Titanic, and two unknown dudes named Steve Jobs and Harry Potter were just getting their beginning.

And yet that very 1997 was the last time the San Antonio Spurs didn’t make the NBA playoffs. David Robinson missed most of the season hurt, and the Spurs tanked all the way to a #1 pick they used on some dude named Tim. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Spurs bounced back from 20 to 56 wins the following season and won their first NBA championship the year after. They haven’t missed the playoffs since. And if this season is cancelled, that will still be true when basketball next continues.

Are the Spurs clearly on the downswing and bound to miss the next playoffs and blow their 22-in-a-row anyway? Yeah, sure, probably. But the streak lives, at least for now. Look, there aren’t a lot of winners here!

4. Guys already locked into monster contracts

After a ton of player movement last summer and even more to come in 2021, this was not going to be a major free agency offseason, so players shouldn’t lose huge money in the immediate future. Of course, a cancelled season would mean quite a chunk of change lost by the players thanks to the force majeure clause. That’s a loss for everyone.

But wouldn’t it be nice to be locked up to a nice long monster deal right now?

Think Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, Jimmy Butler, Khris Middleton, Tobias Harris, C.J. McCollum, and John Wall (remember him?!). Every one of those names is still owed at least $100 million in the future, most of them significantly more. That’s well over $1 billion in contract money to just 11 guys.

What does the financial future of the NBA looks like? At this point, we simply do not know. It’s safe to assume the salary cap will drop going forward, maybe precipitously. Remember, the NBA was already worried about a cap drop after the political situation with China. Add in the lost revenue of an entire playoffs too and it could get ugly. We’ll leave the math to the cap experts, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see the salary cap drop by something in the eight-figure range for awhile — aka $10 million or more, per team.

But contracts are contracts, and the names above are getting that money no matter what happens to the cap (barring an extended cancellation, of course). Guys like Curry and Harden are scheduled to make over $40 million each of the next three years, nearly $50 million at the back end. That was supposed to match a continuously rising salary cap so the deals would take up around a third of the cap. It’s not inconceivable now that one of those contracts alone could end up closer to half the cap now.

Of course, the richest NBA players are also the guys who lose the most in the immediate future — as much as $5 or $10 million each, depending on how things work out. But while many marquee names are only signed for another season, those nine names are set long into the future and that money is guaranteed no matter what.

Must be nice.

3. Summer 2021 free agency hype

Hey, you know all those marquee names only signed for one more year?

They’re not winners, or necessarily losers at this point — assuming the world is restored and the salary cap bounces back 15 months from now — but the summer of 2021 is about to be more hype then ever.

Giannis Antetokounmpo will be a free agent next summer. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George will join him. LeBron James and Anthony Davis could too. Rudy Gobert, Victor Oladipo, and Jrue Holiday are the next tier of stars, and expiring rookie deals for Jayson Tatum, Bam Adebayo, Donovan Mitchell, De’Aaron Fox, John Collins and others makes them restricted free agents. Then there’s veterans like Kyle Lowry, Steven Adams, Gordon Hayward, DeMar DeRozan, Andre Drummond, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Mike Conley.

All of those names could change jerseys next summer.

Oh they won’t all move, of course. They never do.

But think how crazy the NBA was just one summer ago when the Lakers and Clippers superteams formed and the entire landscape of the league changed. All that machination was largely for a two-year window, and now we would have lost literally half of that window. Only one team can win the 2021 championship. Anyone that doesn’t might be ready to blow it up, or they may risk losing their biggest stars to free agency.

If we can’t finish this season, there’s a very real chance that all of last summer’s fireworks were for ONE title chase and that the league could practically reset itself one summer for now.

Remember how crazy it was when Kawhi, PG, and Brow all switched teams in one summer? Now add in Giannis and LeBron plus a slew of next-tier stars and let’s watch the world burn.

The countdown to summer 2021 just got hotter than ever.

2. Brooklyn Nets

The Nets are already winners in some ways.

Even if the season doesn’t get cancelled, it’s obviously on a long delay at this point. Now rumors are flying that Kevin Durant is starting to look like Kevin Durant again, which means he could actually still play this season. It’s possible Kyrie Irving could still return too.

Brooklyn is the 7-seed right now and was set to be a pretty easy out for Toronto, but wouldn’t it be something if Durant made his debut in a Nets uniform versus the team he last played against last summer?

The Nets with even a mostly-healthy Durant and Kyrie would be real threats to win the East or maybe even a championship.

Of course, that’s not possible in this scenario, where the entire season gets cancelled. But the Nets are already winners either way.

Remember, Brooklyn knew exactly what they were getting into when they inked Kevin Durant to a fat free agent contract last summer. They knew they were basically punting on this season for three years of KD and Kyrie, and that this summer was always about seeing how the other pieces worked and mostly biding their time waiting for their superstars to get healthy.

This was a lost season for Brooklyn anyway. If it’s a lost season for everyone else too, all the better.

This could turn out to be one big free (fine, $38-million) rehab year for Kevin Durant.

1. Golden State Warriors

Of course, as with everything else in basketball the last five years, no team wins bigger than the Golden State Warriors.

Speaking of lost seasons, was there a bigger lost season in recent memory than the one the Warriors just embarked on?

Golden State has played in the last five NBA Finals, winning three championships along the way. In those five postseasons alone, they won 16, 15, 16, 16, and 14 games.

Then this season came and the Warriors won… 15 games. Except it was the regular season this time. Golden State was the only team in the entire NBA that was already mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.

The Warriors dropped from a 0.695 winning percentage in last year’s regular season to just 0.231 this year. That loss of 46.4% would have been the fourth most precipitous drop in NBA history, behind only the 2011 Cavs, the 1999 Bulls, and those aforementioned 1997 Spurs. NBA fans will quickly place each of those seasons as one when an MVP-caliber player disappeared: LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and David Robinson.

Of course that happened doubly to Golden State with Kevin Durant leaving and Stephen Curry missing almost the entire season injured, and it turns out that when you lose two MVP candidates at once, the team suffers. Eric Paschall led all Warriors in points this year. Marquese Chriss led the team in rebounding. Think about how ridiculous that is for a team that had maybe the most talented roster in NBA history less than one year ago.

But if the NBA season gets cancelled, you really couldn’t script a better outcome for these Warriors.

Steph and Klay get an entire year off to rehab injuries and rest their ailing bodies after five grueling runs. Draymond Green effectively took the year off too. Instead the team spent their season developing some new role players and maybe even turning Durant’s salary into a possibly maybe I-guess-ya-never-know useful Andrew Wiggins.

In the meantime, they rolled up the losses and secured the top spot in the draft lottery, giving them yet another chance to add an undeserved high-end talent to an already loaded roster. Heck, even finishing out the season normally might have cost them that, now that Curry had finally returned.

Even the impending cap problems might be in the Warriors’ favor. Teams can’t typically go over the cap, but they are allowed to stay over the cap to sign rookie deals and minimum free agents. That will restrict some of Golden State’s biggest opponents from adding key pieces to their core.

The Warriors are far, far over the cap with Steph, Klay, Draymond, and Wiggins, but that was always going to be true. Now they have the Wiggins salary to use as a makeweight in a possible trade, and they still have that Andre Iguodala trade exception. They can also sign potentially the #1 pick in the draft, a $10-million value player, to go even further over the cap without any penalty.

Golden State could trade Wiggins in a package for another $30-million player, and they could use the Iguodala exception to add another $17-million asset this summer. And depending on what they have to give up, they might still keep that high lottery pick.

Heck, they could later trade that high draft pick with the new $17-million player from the Iggy exception and net ANOTHER $30-million player. Golden State could legally end up with FOUR max players, and that’s not even counting Draymond Green.

Think about that. Golden State could potentially trade this summer for players like Jrue Holiday and Evan Fournier, then add James Wiseman or Anthony Edwards at the top of the draft, and all of it would be legal. They’d add those players to unexpectedly developed rookies Eric Paschall and Jordan Poole, and then, of course, the coup de grace: they get Steph, Klay, and Draymond back after a full year of rest and recuperation.

Remember when the Warriors had the “second longest winning streak” in NBA history when we magically counted four wins from a previous season for no real reason?

What if the Warriors make the Finals next summer and the summer after and the one after that? Will the Warriors have made eight**** consecutive******** NBA Finals? And do you realize how insufferable that will make that fan base?

This whole thing really couldn’t have worked out much better for the Ws.

Even in Coronavirus, the Golden State Warriors win again.

They always do. ■

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