In three days, the Los Angeles Lakers will be playing basketball on a screen near you, as they begin their first of three preseason scrimmages prior to their 8 seeding games of the NBA Restart at Walt Disney World. The Lakers don’t expect to have their star players out there in every game, but the games will also be shorter than usual.
Tim Reynolds of the Associated Press reported over the weekend that scrimmages will be 40-minute games, for a variety of reasons, including that some teams don’t have their full rosters available to them.
The NBA is tweaking the rules for those initial matchups, going with 10-minute quarters instead of the usual 12 minutes. The change is for several reasons — among them, not wanting to overly tax players’ bodies after they went more than four months without games, and because some teams do not have their full rosters at Walt Disney World yet because of coronavirus and other issues.
The Lakers are scheduled to face off against the Dallas Mavericks in their first scrimmage on July 23.
