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Rare strain: The third Corona season in the NBA seems like the craziest of all - Walla! sport

2022-01-11T12:28:07.450Z


Past players are called to the flag with no choice, teams that were supposed to connect get stuck, and the gaps between contenders for the crown are growing. The Omicron shuffled the cards again in the league


Rare strain: The third Corona season in the NBA seems like the craziest of them all

Past players are called to the flag with no choice, teams that were supposed to connect get stuck, and the gaps between contenders for the crown are growing.

The Omicron has shuffled the cards again in the best league in the world, and above all stands the adventurous experiment of Kyrie and Brooklyn.

One thing is for sure: the end will be as crazy as the beginning

Assaf Ravitz

11/01/2022

Tuesday, January 11, 2022, 2:00 p.m.

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Danny Abdia speaks after the victory on his birthday (video editing: Nir Chen)

The Corona has been with us for two years and is not going anywhere. This is already the third sports season it has affected, and recently new bizarre records have been broken around the two most famous athletes refusing to get vaccinated. On a day when the Australian authorities refused to allow Novak Djokovic to enter the country to take part in the Australian Open, Kyrie Irving made his Brooklyn Nets debut in a situation where he could only participate in away games.



We'll return to Kyrie's bizarre situation later, but the Corona's influence really does not end there. The last month has been the most hallucinatory in the NBA at least since most of the league jumped in to host Mickey Mouse. After for the first two months the 2021/22 season seemed to be able to run smoothly when it came to the plague (except for the Kyrie case), the Omicron strain led to a sudden inflation in infections, so within a few weeks hundreds of players and staff across the league fell into isolation. Teams had to make do without 8-9 players and many of the games during this period lost meaning.



The attitude of the league was to continue at all costs.

Adam Silver did his best not to stop the games, he allowed teams to sign several players on temporary contracts to reach the amount that would allow them to play, and still had to postpone a double-digit amount of games.

Now that the wave seems to be in significant decline, it can be said that Silver was up to the task: the league did not stop, the prestigious Christmas games were in full swing, the money from broadcasting and ticket sales continues to flow, all teams will probably play 82 games and the playoffs will start in time. New during it, because it will already make the season meaningless).

The question is at what price, what are the implications of this period for the season it has challenged.

More on Walla!

Chonsi Billups: "Kyrie Irving is the most talented coordinator in history"

To the full article

The goal has been achieved, we will know the price later.

Adam Silver (Photo: GettyImages, Tom Pennington)

Amputation in sequence

Many tend to underestimate the regular season in the NBA: it's too long, teams do not really care about individual games, quite a few teams do not even try to win in a given season. The real league, they say, starts in the playoffs. But the regular season is the stage where teams are formed, formed, developed. NBA coaches do not treat individual regular season games as games that are very important to them to win, but the reason is that they prefer to use them to instill habits in the team and players. They will not dramatically change the division of minutes, will not exceptionally prepare for a specific opponent beyond basic adjustments, because the goal is for players to get used to the method of play, to their normal division of minutes and to each other.



The last month was supposed to be the stage where teams are starting to take shape. The first month is a time for probing and making decisions about the rotation, then getting into the rhythm. In a normal season, this is the stage where a clear distinction is made between the good and medium and weak teams, the stage where it is possible to understand whether the method works properly. It is also the stage where the players enter a fixed rhythm on a personal level, and the senior ones are the ones who know how to perform night after night, use a routine to stay at a fixed level of functioning.



This year, the vast majority of teams could not reach this stage. Instead of getting into a rhythm, starting to operate on an automaton, they got into a survival situation where the only goal is to get enough players to play a game, no matter who and in what positions. The developmental sequence of the groups was interrupted, their ability to become who they were meant to be significantly impaired. In quite a few cases the coaches also had to go into isolation, which made it even more difficult for them to maintain any continuity during this period. On a personal level, a large proportion of the league’s players have found themselves in a week-to-two-week isolation where they also have no option to train, which severely impairs the ability to get into the regular pace required for consistently high productivity.



It is easy to think that this is a total respite of two to three weeks and the groups will connect a little later. But this amputation will require them to start almost from scratch: to get back into shape, to re-formulate the method and the rotation, to re-understand what works and what does not, to make new decisions about the staff. The last point puts the general managers into the equation, perhaps the people who have worked hardest in the last month to maintain their survival status. The problem is that it comes at the expense of their ability to work on strengthening staff. Just before the new outbreak there were many rumors of potential trades, ahead of a trade season that was supposed to be particularly fruitful. The outburst also interrupted all trade calls. The principals were busy beating an eighth-player player to a ten-day contract, and even then transitions could not be made while players were isolated and the situation of many was unclear. The day-to-day operations of the NBA have come to a complete halt in this regard as well.



The main beneficiaries are the groups that came to an eruption when they were already crystallized. These are mostly the West's top three right now: Utah whose roster and method have been running for years, Phoenix that continues exactly where it left off last year and Golden State which has reinvented the dynasty's winning formula. To them can be added the champion Milwaukee, who occasionally mentions that it is a well-oiled machine even when it suffers from many absences. It could be that the last month has only widened the gap between them and the group avenue that was supposed to challenge them.



Teams that have changed coaches this summer are having a hard time right now, this list includes Dallas, Portland, Boston and Indiana, with Washington also losing credit from the start of the season.

Teams that have made significant changes to the roster have mixed results at the moment, mainly thanks to Chicago which has connected quickly and is leading the East, but its growth process has also been interrupted and recently it is more victorious than looking like a cohesive and quality bunch.

I would not be surprised if these teams, and others like Philadelphia and Miami, fail to make a leap that in a regular season many of them would make, will reach the playoffs when they are far from complete.

Each will have its own specific explanations, but the dramatic interruption of the season will have a significant impact on that.

The corona widened the gaps?

Yannis Antocompo and Chris Middleton (Photo: Reuters)

the other side

There is also a bright spot in the strange situation the league has found itself in. The past month has forced teams to give a stage to fringe players and sign players to complete the roster. As a result, completely anonymous names got the spotlight, while more and more familiar names from the past suddenly reappeared. Isaiah Thomas, Demarcus Cousins, Lance Stevenson, Greg Monroe and many others got a new chance, even completely forgotten names like Mario Chalmers and C.J. Miles came up as candidates. It can be assumed that for some of them this will be a leap back to the league. Every such comeback story is exciting and adds interest to the league.



In the big picture, it is precisely the secondary and anonymous actors who broke out during this period may turn out to be more significant. The multiplicity of absences has forced coaches to give greater responsibility to the roll players, and to provide opportunities for faculty players who typically only see parquet in Garbage Time. Some took the opportunity to the fullest. It could be that the strange situation helped the coaches discover potential rotation players that they would otherwise have missed. It makes a lot of sense that in the upcoming playoffs we hear about some players who broke through in the month of Omicron and became significant players on big teams, for example Gary Peyton Jr. in Golden State, Jordan Navarra in Milwaukee and maybe even Jaylen Smith who popped up out of nowhere in Phoenix.



In recent years, Miami has become an expert in identifying and developing players who were not selected in the draft, and this time, too, it appears to be a major beneficiary of the situation, which also includes a blow to injuries. Anonymous Max Strauss performs the role of Duncan Robinson better this year than Duncan Robinson, last month he scored 17.2 points and 3.8 threes per game in excellent percentages, and it could be that Eric Spolstra has earned another threesome expert for rotation. Turkish inside player Omar Yurtsban has proven himself as a pump of rebounds and in general as a player who can fit into a legitimate team. The team that needed depth found him, once again, at the back of its roster.



But anonymous players who take a real place in the rotation are rare. What has happened more in the last month is that secondary players whose role has grown significantly have proven they have something to contribute. Perhaps the best example of this is Jaylen Bronson, who in many of this month's games was the only creative player left on the Dallas roster. He jumped at the chance and proved that he has developed into a scorer and a game manager who can be built on, maybe he will even earn a place in the top five alongside Luka Doncic and be the one to manage to take the load off him. There are quite a few more such examples, only later will we know if they will survive the return to full staff.



While systematicity is necessary for a team to crystallize during the season, many NBA teams suffer from over-systematicity, a lack of flexibility that prevents them from responding when they are required to change and think outside the box.

This happens time and time again in the playoffs both at the level of the method of play and at the level of demand from individual players, who reach the playoffs and are unable to deviate from the limited role assigned to them throughout the season.

Maybe the last month will allow teams to reach the playoffs more flexibly, more prepared for surprises and rivals neutralizing their method and stars.

Such a discovery could not have grown in days as a correction.

Gary Peyton Jr. (Photo: GettyImages, Cole Burston)

The Brooklyn experiment

Alongside last month's effects on the league as a whole, Brooklyn exists in a separate universe. Steve Nash's team is not trying to build a cohesive method, uses the regular season to experiment with different lineups and makes flexibility its top value. Nash's rationale is that if he knows how to adapt to any opponent, especially defensively, his stars will do the job on offense and win the series. But even for the Nets, the idea of ​​using a player who can only play away games seems excessive, requiring too many daily adjustments, too much flexibility. Until the last few weeks. The epidemic of absences that led to the decision to bring Kyrie Irving back to business now seems mostly like an excuse, until he got the staff back to being almost full. The people of Brooklyn just came to the conclusion that it was better to have half a Kyrie in hand, that they wanted to participate in this experiment.



Until a few months ago we could not imagine a scenario where one of the stars of the top candidate for the championship could only play away games.

Now this is the reality, and it is of course unprecedented.

Needless to try to bet what it will look like.

Such a situation requires unusual grouping, destroying any possibility of instilling stable habits, of maintaining a constant rotation.

The demand begins with Kyrie himself, who will have to maintain a positive tension as the rests between games change from one to two days a week or two, and continues with James Harden and Kevin Durant functioning differently with and without Kyrie.

But if there is one team that can withstand such a challenge it is Brooklyn, which even last year failed to create a sense of continuity in the regular season due to the many absences of the stars, and that did not stop it from looking great in the playoffs until the injuries got there as well.

This is also an important point: Kyrie is very prone to injuries and the inconsistency will increase the danger.

Will Brooklyn be the first team to try to avoid a home advantage?

Kyrie (Photo: GettyImages, Andy Lyons)

The good news is that we will once again get to see the most talented offensive trio that has ever played together in an NBA team.

In the few minutes shared by the three to date they have seemed connected and unstoppable, taking advantage of each other and allowing for a fluid team game.

Alongside quality attacking players like Patti Mills and Marcus Aldridge, and alongside an excellent outside scorer like Joe Harris, this could be a special team.

The fact that it can only appear in away games will add a comic element.

If the situation remains the same in the playoffs, Brooklyn will be the first team in history to prefer to avoid a home advantage.

Any loss from here on out will result in whether the Nets intentionally lose in order to drop in the rankings.

My suggestion is not to try to bet where it will develop, but to worry about tickets in the front row of this madness.

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Source: walla

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