The NBA has officially announced it will cancel 43 preseason games and postpone training camps until an as yet to be determined date. This isn’t anything that was unexpected, of course, but it makes the situation surrounding the NBA lockout seem just a bit more dire.
NBA Officially Cancels 43 Preseason Games, Delays Start Of Training Camp
The NBA was expected to open training camps on October 3, less than two weeks away, with preseason games beginning not long after that date. The inability to achieve any sort of deal during Wednesday and Thursday’s meetings between representatives for the owners and the players meant that at least a delay to the start of the NBA season was inevitable.
“We have regretfully reached the point on the calendar where we are not able to open training camps on time and need to cancel the first week of preseason games,” NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver said in a press release. “We will make further decisions as warranted.”
The loss of some preseason games isn't the worst news as it's been long expected barring any sort of miracle, but the next thing set to be cancelled would be regular season games -- though that situation is much more important, and therefore avoidable, provided that David Stern and Derek Fisher can come to some sort of an agreement.
As SB Nation’s Tom Ziller wrote earlier Friday morning, the date that the Collective Bargaining Agreement needs to officially be agreed upon is still up in the air.
This thing is going all the way down to the wire; it’s actually fun to see reporters continue to push the “drop-dead” date for the season to be preserved. We’d thought Oct. 1 would mark a real deadline to save the season start, but Berger offers up Oct. 14 as a date that would delay the season start but get us 82 games. So sometime in the next three weeks, we’ll actually have a drop-dead date.
That would mean there are about three weeks for the two sides to get something done. It seems possible, right?
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