2020–21 NBA season

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2020-21 NBA season began just 72 days after the previous season ended. That is the shortest off-season in league history, a gap so compressed that the league barely had time to absorb what it had just been through. The season that followed was the 75th in NBA history, though the league chose to save that anniversary celebration for the following year. What filled the 2020-21 season instead was something stranger: a shortened schedule, a team playing its home games in another country's city, a global health crisis dictating the terms of almost every game played, and a string of individual performances that rewrote record books across multiple categories. The questions worth sitting with are these: How did professional basketball survive one of its most disruptive years? Who rose to define it? And what did the league look like when fans finally started trickling back through the doors?

• 2. A Season Squeezed

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  the 22nd of December 2020, became the opening night of a regular season that almost did not start until January. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had floated the idea of delaying to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, citing local health orders that would restrict fan attendance in most cities. His concern was financial: the league draws 40 percent of its revenue from attendance, and playing to empty arenas meant playing at a steep loss. The National Basketball Players Association tentatively approved a 72-game schedule on the 5th of November 2020, shaving ten games off the standard 82. It was the shortest regular season since the 2011-12 season, when a labor lockout had forced each team to play just 66 games starting on Christmas Day. The condensed 2020-21 calendar was engineered with a specific deadline in mind: the NBA Finals had to conclude by July 22 so that players could represent their countries at the Summer Olympics, themselves already delayed a year from Tokyo because of the pandemic in Japan. Training camp did not open until November 10, the preseason ran only eight days, and the schedule was released in two halves rather than all at once.

• 3. Raptors in Tampa

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  Toronto played its home games in Florida. The Canadian federal government refused to allow the Toronto Raptors to host opponents in Toronto, ruling that repeated cross-border travel between the United States and Canada posed too great a health risk given the differing levels of COVID-19 cases in each country. It was the same logic that had pushed the Toronto Blue Jays to play their 2020 baseball home games in Buffalo. The Raptors announced on the 20th of November 2020 that Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida would serve as their home court for the entire season. The last time an NBA team had been displaced from its home city was in 2007, when the New Orleans Hornets finished their temporary stay in Oklahoma City after Hurricane Katrina had driven them out in 2005. The Raptors' situation in Tampa came with its own complications: Vinik Sports Group, the operator of Amalie Arena, closed the building to spectators until at least February 5 due to rising local case counts. When crowds were eventually allowed back in, the Raptors played to an arena capped at 3,800 spectators beginning March 13.

• 4. Notebooks Full of Records

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  Stephen Curry scored 62 points in a single game, the individual high-water mark for points that season. On the 27th of December 2020, he became the third player in history to reach 2,500 career three-pointers. Less than a month later, on the 23rd of January 2021, he passed Reggie Miller for second place on the all-time three-point list. By the 12th of April 2021, he had surpassed Wilt Chamberlain as the Golden State Warriors' all-time leading scorer. Russell Westbrook of the Washington Wizards wrote his own chapter. On the 8th of May 2021, he tied Oscar Robertson's record for career triple-doubles at 181. Two days later he broke it, reaching 182. By May 3 he had clinched a fourth season averaging a triple-double, and in that same game he posted 14 points, 21 rebounds and 24 assists against the Indiana Pacers, becoming only the third player ever to record a 20-rebound, 20-assist game. LaMelo Ball of the Charlotte Hornets, at 19 years and 140 days old, became the youngest player ever to record a triple-double on the 9th of January 2021, breaking the mark held by Markelle Fultz. Carmelo Anthony of the Portland Trail Blazers climbed steadily up the all-time scoring list all season, passing Tim Duncan, Dominique Wilkins, Oscar Robertson, Hakeem Olajuwon, and eventually Elvin Hayes to land at 10th place by May 3.

• 5. The First Play-In

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  From May 18 to 21, the NBA ran a play-in tournament for the first time in its history. Teams finishing seventh through tenth in each conference competed in a short bracket to decide the final two playoff spots per side. The format gave teams outside the traditional top six a genuine path to the postseason, and it changed the stakes of late-season games for teams that might otherwise have been mathematically safe or mathematically doomed. The full 16-team playoffs followed immediately after, beginning May 22, with four rounds of best-of-seven series. Damian Lillard delivered one of the more remarkable individual performances of the postseason: on the 1st of June 2021, he made 12 three-pointers in a single playoff game, breaking an NBA playoff record, and scored 55 points in a 147-140 overtime loss to the Denver Nuggets in game 5 of the first round. The 2021 NBA Finals began on the 6th of July and concluded on the 20th.

• 6. Nikola Jokic and the MVP

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  On the 8th of June 2021, Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets became the first center to win the NBA Most Valuable Player award since Shaquille O'Neal in 2000. He was also the first Nuggets player, the first Serbian-born player, and the lowest-drafted player ever to claim the honor. His season statistics included 60 double-doubles, the most of any player, and a league-best efficiency rating of 35.9 per game. Jokic's compatriot Vasilije Micic, playing for Anadolu Efes in Turkey, won the EuroLeague MVP that same season, making Jokic and Micic the first pair of players from the same country to hold both titles simultaneously. Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz won Defensive Player of the Year, shooting 67.4 percent from the field during the regular season. LaMelo Ball of the Charlotte Hornets took Rookie of the Year. Tom Thibodeau, hired by the New York Knicks in July 2020, won Coach of the Year. Julius Randle of those same Knicks won Most Improved Player and averaged 37.6 minutes per game, the most of any player in the league.

• 7. Protests, Postponements, and Transitions

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  On the 6th of January 2021, the Milwaukee Bucks and Detroit Pistons held the ball for seven seconds on their first possessions of the game, a deliberate act referencing the seven gunshots fired at Jacob Blake. Various teams linked arms at center court during the anthem in response to the storming of the United States Capitol that same day. On April 12, a game between Brooklyn and Minnesota was postponed due to feared civil unrest following the killing of Daunte Wright in nearby Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. The COVID-19 postponements were relentless. Washington and Memphis each had stretches of six or more consecutive games postponed as contact tracing repeatedly left rosters below the league's required minimum of eight available players. Three games in February 2021 were pushed back because of a winter storm in Texas. Behind the scenes, a quieter transition was underway. Spalding had supplied the league's official game ball since the 1983-84 season, but on the 13th of May 2020 the NBA announced that Wilson would return as the official ball brand starting with the 2021-22 season. The Denver Nuggets renamed their arena from the Pepsi Center to Ball Arena on the 22nd of October 2020. And Fox Sports Networks, which had simulcast 36 Raptors games locally in the Tampa Bay market during the season, rebranded entirely as Bally Sports on the 31st of March 2021, part of an agreement between Sinclair Broadcast Group and casino operator Bally's Corporation.