The NBA season is just shy of reaching the four-week mark and has already had to postpone 13 games due to teams being unable to field the necessary eight players to play a game because of COVID-19.
On Friday the league announced that a pair of games between the Washington Wizards and Cleveland Cavaliers scheduled for Sunday and Monday had been called off and later in the day added that Friday’s contest between the Minnesota Timberwolves and Memphis Grizzlies to the growing list of postponements.
As the NBA works to tighten health and safety guidelines and push through the regular season, the league office and team general managers reportedly are also looking for ways to expand rosters and make more players available to teams.
According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the idea of allowing teams to add a third two-way player to the roster gained significant steam on a call between the league and general managers Friday.
Currently teams can have 15 regular-contract players along with two two-way players, who are eligible to spend 50 days with the affiliated NBA team this season (up from 45 days in previous seasons). Those active days include practice days, not just game days or days when they play.
With the two-way players limited in how much time they can spend with an NBA team, Utah Jazz coach Quin Snyder said that he would prefer for the league to expand the days a two-way player can be activated so that they don’t have to wait to call up a player from the G League.
“The first thing would be just to let us use our two-way players,” Snyder said Friday. “Frankly, what’s happening now is that you’re essentially preserving those days so that if something happens with an injury, or particularly a COVID situation where you have some players that are in contact tracing, you don’t find yourself at the end of the year with two-way players that are actually unable to play because you’ve used all your days.”
In preserving those days, the two-way players also miss out on time spent practicing with the NBA team and gaining familiarity with the players and system, making it even harder for them to be impactful when they are activated.
The NBA released just the first half of the regular-season schedule this year, knowing that the potential for game postponements was possible, but with certain teams experiencing more cases of COVID-19 and players out due to contact tracing than other teams, scheduling those games at the end of the season may be difficult.
The Wizards, who have now had four games postponed, including Wednesday’s game against the Jazz, are facing the possibility of missing out on even more games as they deal with a coronavirus outbreak that has seen six players test positive and put even more in contact tracing protocol.
“We’re hoping if there’s no positive test tomorrow that we can get guys back in the gym one-on-zero, kind of similar to where we were preparing to go to the bubble as we continue to test,” Washington general manager Tommy Sheppard said Friday. “Right now, everyone is testing twice a day. We’re following the very strict protocols the NBA have going on right now, and certainly our hope is to start getting at least some semblance of activity tomorrow in the building, but none of that’s guaranteed.”
The Phoenix Suns have also been dealing with a rash of cases and have had three games postponed.
Despite the rising number of cases in the NBA, commissioner Adam Silver has said that the league currently has no plans of pausing the season, hoping that stronger guidelines will help.