As a top-four team in the East, the Boston Celtics might have a bone to pick about losing a hard-earned home court advantage in the new format adopted by the NBA to resume the 2019-20 season.
If they have voiced concerns about it, it hasn’t been leaked.
The issue is that by holding all games in a single-site location to prevent as much risk as possible to players, staff and other necessary support, all teams participating in the postseason will effectively be playing on a neutral site — and with that, lose whatever advantage the home crowd brings.
For some teams, that may not be a massive issue, but for anyone who’s ever attended a game of import at TD Garden, it’s certainly not a negligible one, either.
There have been some creative ideas ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reports as being tossed around to try and find ways to replicate that advantage, earned by the top four teams in terms of record in each conference.
Some are parsimonious, some absurd — we’ll let you judge which are which.
They include the ‘home court’ team get an extra coaches’ challenge, or get possession of the ball automatically at the start of some periods (instead of a jump ball), or have a designated player with an extra, seventh foul.
There’s even been a suggestion of letting teams bring their entire home court itself, thereby giving them quite literally their home court to play on.
Sans audience, of course.
It doesn’t seem likely the NBA will be doing much (if anything) to address such concerns given the magnitude of the challenge they have before them in trying to safely conduct a basketball season in a pandemic. But, it will be curious to see what effect — if any — the neutral court concept has on games.
Like so much right now, we have been forced into an awful, unintended experiment when it comes to what works in professional sports.
Fingers crossed we actually get to the point of having games we were irked no one had home court, but got played nonetheless.
