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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – The NBA should have its hands full in the coming days.

As the league progresses towards a plan to resume the 2019-20 season – likely at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, beginning late July or early August – they’ve got the unenviable task of trying to appease as many people as possible.

The board of governors is scheduled to meet via conference call on Friday. While they’re not expected to finalize a decision at that time, per ESPN, a few different proposals will be presented. A vote – and perhaps an announcement – could take place as early as Monday, sources confirm.

On top of the obvious No. 1 priority – minimizing risk and ensuring that playing basketball in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic can be done safely – the NBA must determine what a return to play will look like.

How many of the association’s 30 teams are going to participate? Will they play regular-season games or fast-forward to the playoffs? How will the playoff format be structured?

The debate has raged on throughout the week, both inside the league and out, with many different scenarios being considered. Each of them comes with pros and cons. Each has supporters and critics.

If there is a solution out there that checks off all of the boxes and satisfies the masses, commissioner Adam Silver and company are desperately trying to find it. The reality is setting in, though: whatever they decide, somebody is going to be unhappy.

Let’s say they bring back all 30 teams. Most owners would be pleased. Teams need to play at least 70 games per season to meet the minimum requirements on their regional television deals, and to cash those big cheques. However, after speaking with players and coaches on non-playoff clubs, it’s safe to say that many are less inclined to put themselves and their families at risk just to ramp up, play five or six regular-season games, and then go home without much to gain.

What if they decide to skip to the postseason and limit the league’s Disney campus to the 16 teams that were occupying playoffs seeds when play was suspended on March 11? That would put fewer people at risk – check off one very important box. But what about teams like Portland, New Orleans and Sacramento, who were all 3.5 games out of the West’s final playoff spot and would have had a real chance at catching eighth-place Memphis? How about San Antonio, who has a 22-year playoff streak at stake, and was a half game behind those other three teams?

Then there’s the idea of a play-in tournament, which could allow those bubble teams to compete for the last few slots. That would be nice for those bubble teams, but not so nice for the clubs currently occupying those final seeds – Brooklyn and Orlando in the East, Dallas and Memphis out West. Then, how would the top-seeded teams feel about sitting around while their competition gets an opportunity to play in high-leverage games and shake off any rust from the long layoff?

Some have suggested using World Cup-style pool play in the first round, so every team can get the same number of games in. It could be fun, but it would almost certainly devalue the regular season accomplishments of the league’s best teams and open the door for early upsets – something that might appeal to fans but probably wouldn’t sit well with the likes of the Bucks, Lakers, Clippers and Raptors, among others.

Re-seeding 1-to-16 by record, regardless of conference, is an interesting idea. It’s something the NBA has contemplated for years and is more feasible now that the inconvenience of travelling across time zones isn’t standing in the way. But would Eastern Conference teams sign off on it, knowing it’s likely to create tougher matchups for them this season (and in the future, if this format sticks)?

The NBA’s challenge is to find the best solution, or maybe the least objectionable solution – a workable solution. Problem is, regardless of what they propose and ultimately what they decide on, they’re going to have teams, owners, players and fans – among others – questioning the fairness of it. The counterargument is: what’s fair these days?

“The situation is unfair but life’s not fair a lot of times,” Lakers guard Danny Green told TSN over the phone this week. “I think a lot of people are going to put an asterisk next to this season. Whoever wins, they’ll say ‘it was a quarantine season, it wasn’t a fair season’.”

The former Raptor raises a valid point and something that the NBA is surely aware of. For the league to salvage the season and legitimize its ending (and champion), they can’t get too innovative with their format.

Like Green, they know the asterisk conversation is inevitable. It happens most years anyway. If people want to put an asterisk next to Toronto’s 2019 title, what are they going to say about the champion that’s crowned in an empty arena following a four-month hiatus?

Obviously, this is a strange situation. However, the more gimmicks you introduce, the stranger it becomes and the louder that asterisk conversation will get. With that in mind, the best solution might be the simplest solution: whatever keeps the league’s standard playoff structure intact as much as possible, given the circumstances.

“I think the champion [will actually be] more deserving,” Green said. “If we win, or whoever wins, [we’ve had to] fight through everything we’ve fought through throughout the year. You’ve had to stay in shape during this, you’ve had to stay in shape for a longer period of time, you had to take a break and do a second training camp, and then come back. But people are going to look at it differently. Hopefully they come up with something that’s fair. But if not, a lot of things that happened this year aren’t fair, so we have to make do with what’s coming at us and then adjust to it.”​​